In Darkest Germany

"By Victor, qollanicl

iMroduicdon (y Robert M-. Hutc h i n( s

'Wit^ 144

PHOTOGRAPHS

IN DARKEST GERMANY

HENRY REGNERY COMPANY

The Devin- Adair Co., 23 E. 26th St., New York 10, N.Y.

DISTRIBUTORS

IN DARKEST GERMANY

BY

VICTOR GOLLANCZ

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT M. HuTCHINS

“Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto
me, O children of Israel? saith the Lord.
Have not I brought up Israel out of the land
of Egypt? and the Philistines from Caphtor,
and the Syrians from Kir?” Amos, ix. 7

HINSDALE, ILLINOIS

HENRY REGNERY COMPANY

1947

Copyright 1947 by Victor Gollancz

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Authorized American Edition

Production and design by Edit, Inc., Chicago

FOR

ERWIN STADTHAGEN

INTRODUCTION

This is a remarkable book. In a time when the indi-
vidual has been lost in the mass and when ideals are
regarded largely as a means to mislead and deceive, we
have, in Victor Gollancz, a man who can still think and
speak of human beings, rather than of Germans, Jews or
Russians, and to whom the ideals of our Christian heritage
are sacred.

The picture of misery and despair which this book re-
flects is based on first-hand information gathered during
October and November, 1946. It is unfortunately neces-
sary to report that conditions one year later will probably
be little better, and may even be worse. Although the
Directives issued July 15th, 1947, to General Clay repre-
sent at their face value a complete change of policy from
that prescribed in the Directives of May, 1945, they may
prove to be equally futile and unworkable. Orders, even
if issued from the highest levels, provide in themselves no
guarantee that they will have the desired effect, and while
Washington now wisely gives the Germans the right to
find their own form of democracy, there are still many
conditions attached to their freedom of action.

General Clay is told that we are seeking a “loose federal
government for Germany.” What constitutes in the eyes
of Washington and General Clay a too-centralized form
of government? Would the Weimar Republic, for example,
be regarded as such a government? This, certainly, in-
volves the exercise of a kind of “external” political in-
fluence which we ourselves have denounced in principle.

These new Directives assume the maintenance of a pa-
ternalistic military rule in Germany, regardless of what

7

may be said about permitting the Germans to live accord-
ing to “democratic principles.” The principles of self-
government and of liberty for the individual are difficult
to realize under external supervision, no matter how
benevolent or well-intentioned. The new Directives, al-
though a welcome step in the right direction, do not alter
the basic character of the military occupation.

Such alterations as have been made in detail and in
ultimate purpose will, let us hope, give the Germans some
improvement of their physical situation. They do not,
however, create the atmosphere in which work prospers.
We have allowed Germany to sink into a state of despair
and misery and in doing so have threatened the structure
of the entire continent. We now desire to halt the down-
ward decline. We grant some concessions. For the moment
they may appear impressive. But we should not delude
ourselves into thinking that Europe is saved. In Germany
we shall demonstrate to the world whether our ideals of
freedom, individual rights, and democracy have any real
content.

This book — written by a man who is a Socialist and a
Jew — is one of the first to attack the barbaric policy of the
victors toward the vanquished on the basis of the Christian
ideal. It is not strange that Victor Gollancz should write
such a book, but it is a reflection on the times in which we
live that his is almost the only book which has approached
this problem on the basis of the one real issue involved
in it — namely, moral values.

Robert M. Hutchins
July 1947

8

THANKS

I wish to express my gratitude to Norfolk House, for the
facilities afforded to me and the arrangements so kindly
made for my comfort and convenience; to Brigadier
Treadwell, General Fanshaw, Air Vice-marshal Cham-
pion de Crespigny, Mr. Griffin, Mr. Harry Walston, and
Brigadier Bonsey for their gracious hospitality ; to Public
Relations in the zone, and particularly to Mr. Nicol, Mr.
Tom Guthrie, and Major Scott-Atkinson ; to my conduct-
ing officer, Peter Flynn, my devoted driver, Mr. Singer,
and my superb and indefatigable Hamburg photographer,
Herr Beutner, as well as to the excellent photographers at
Diisseldorf; to Mr. Hickey, who interpreted so brilliantly
at Diisseldorf; to Mr. Berry, Regional Commissioner for
Hamburg, Mr. Lumley, Regional Economic Officer in
that city, Brigadiers John Cowley and Michael Robinson
of Minden, and Herr Petersen, Herr Landahl, and Dr.
Degkwitz of Hamburg and Landesrat Meier of Diissel-
dorf for very special courtesies; and to all the officials,
British and German, who bore so patiently with my weari-
some questionings, as well as to the many German citizens
who received me with unvarying courtesy when I ven-
tured to enter their dwellings and to ask them about their
circumstances.

No one here mentioned must be assumed to agree with
any of the views I express.

V. G.

9

CONTENTS

Foreword

Page 13

I.

Food and Health

(i) Britain and Diisseldorf

25

(ii) Hunger Oedema

27

(iii) Turkeys and Starvation

30

(iv) A Reply to Mr. Strachey

32

(v) A Reply to Mr. Hynd

34

(vi) Rations and the Fusion Plan

37

(vii) More Facts About Health

39

II.

Shoes and Other Things

(i) “This Misery of Boots”

73

(ii) More Facts About Consumer Goods

75

III.

People’s Homes

(i) Letter Written to My Wife

89

(ii) Little Jiilich

108

(iii) More About People’s Homes

111

IV.

The Planning of Ruin

(i) Dortmund and Cologne

175

(ii) The Larger and the Smaller Lunacy

178

V.

The Re-Education of Germany

(i) Herrenvolk

189

(ii) Totalitarian Democracy

193

(iii) A Further Note on Herrenvolk

198

(iv) Some Menus at Officers’ Messes

203

VI.

Isolation of the Mind

227

VII.

German Youth

230

VIII.

Summary

240

Appendix

“What Say They?”

244

FOREWORD

I left London for the British zone of Germany on
October 2nd and arrived back on November 15th. This is,
I believe, the longest visit paid to the zone since victory.
Two or three weeks have usually been considered more than
adequate, and Mr. Hynd, the Chancellor of the Duchy,
said the other day in the House that during the last twelve
months he had spent no more than twenty-eight days in
Germany. I mention the length of my visit only to excuse
myself for my temerity in publishing a book, or rather an
apology for a book, about my findings. The time proved,
in point of fact, quite insufficient for the purpose I had in
view; and when I thought it necessary to hurry back
home there was a great number of matters the mere
fringes of which I had been unable to investigate. I could
not even penetrate to Berlin.

But what I did examine during those six or seven weeks
I examined with care. Though I visited other places as
well, such as Biinde, Herford, Minden and Kiel, I spent
most of the time in Hamburg, Diisseldorf and the Ruhr.
I tried my best to master subjects of which I previously
knew nothing, and this often involved a lengthy cross-
examination of British and German officials, the checking
of one against another, and sometimes the re-examination
of both. I may well have been betrayed into some errors
by my ignorance ; but unless in what follows I qualify any
statement by “I think”, the reader may assume that every
alleged fact has been checked, whenever possible, to the
best of my ability. I adopted the attitude of a sceptic to
everything I was told, whether by British or by Germans.

When I got back, I had to decide how best to make use

*3

of such knowledge as I had been able to acquire. In view
of what I felt to be the deplorable situation in the zone
speed seemed essential, and to sit down and write a
carefully planned book quite out of the question. I
decided therefore to write immediately for the Press as
many letters and articles as possible on different aspects of
the problem, and simultaneously to present some sort of
report to those Ministers, Members of Parliament and
responsible people generally to whom I might be able to
gain access. In all some eighteen letters or articles were
published within a fortnight or so of my return.

But I was repeatedly asked to publish something which,
ephemeral though it in any case must be, might at any
rate be more convenient to handle than a mere series of
newspaper cuttings. I was again faced with the problem
of time, particularly at a moment when the delays in book
production are unconscionable. I thought the best thing,
therefore, would be to bring together the stuff I had
already written, cut out the obvious repetitions, and add a
good deal of supplementary information. That is how this
fiifiXtov afiifSXiov has come into being: and I apologize
for its odd shape and its lack of literary graces.

The same feeling of urgency has prevented me from
dealing with many important subjects. I should have liked,
for instance, to write of our information service, which I
gathered to be deplorable both in big things and in small.
I was told, for instance, by an official of very high regional
rank that when the rations were cut in March there was a
lapse of many days before any serious explanation was
given: and that no real attempt was made to “put over”,
to use his phrase, the recent increase in taxation and cut
in pensions. I report this statement with reserve, for I
had no opportunity of checking its accuracy. But in general
several of the most intelligent officials complained to me
that “things were constantly being done without reason
given”. Of the same order was what was described as

quite a series of broken pledges. It was alleged that issues
both of tea and of extra tobacco were promised but never
materialized. The disastrous muddle in the matter of
domestic fuel and of Sunday work by the miners was
primarily due to an inaccurate Press release, which in-
furiated the miners and convinced their leaders that they
had been “let down”.

The supply of information to our own people is equally
inadequate. I can state, this time with no reserve at all,
that one of the most important zonal officials first heard
something crucially affecting his department when he
read of it in a London newspaper during a few days’
leave : and I was informed by more than one responsible
member of the Control Commission that they “got a lot
of valuable information that vitally concerned them from
The Times ”. I had personal experience of the intellectual
starvation not only of the Germans but of the British too.
At a headquarters mess at which I stayed for more than a
fortnight you never knew what paper might be turning
up : one day it would be The Times, on another the Daily
Express, on a third the Daily Mirror. At another mess you
were bare of information if you were out for lunch, for
people used to disappear to their bedrooms with news-
papers concealed about their persons. I was told that
whenever I personally did this I looked extremely guilty.
My conducting officer spent quite a large portion of his
time stealing newspapers for me from different messes:
he even achieved the triumph of stealing one from my own.

I should also have liked to write about the general
decline of public morality under the impact of the growing
despair and of a financial chaos in which the black and
grey sectors constantly encroach on the legitimate one, and
the mark becomes more and more meaningless. Technic-
ally illegal transactions are, indeed, so open that the epithet
black is a misnomer. A business man wants something he
can’t get legally: he tells his secretary, and an hour later

J 5

he has it. Girls packing seeds abscond with a few packets,
and make as much as the head of the firm. A charwoman
has only to “pinch” a sack of coal in order to earn the
equivalent of at least three months’ wages. The result is
that the youth is growing up with no idea of morality at
all. A technical school in Hamburg is one of the black
market centres for that city. “What does the teacher
say?” one of the pupils was asked. “He’s glad if every now
and again he gets something out of it himself” was the
reply.

Most important of all the omitted topics are those of
youth work and education generally. The total establish-
ment of our youth section, of which it is impossible to
speak too highly, is, or was when I was there, twenty-
three. I have the record of a conversation with an official
familiar with the work of this section. He said that paper,
equipment and premises were virtually unobtainable. In
June two thousand Nissen huts had been promised : the
number had been reduced in July to five hundred : by
October none had been delivered. In July one per cent, of
the bid for timber and point one per cent, of that for steel
had been received, for repairs to cover all educational
necessities. In our zone there was only one youth magazine,
a monthly: in the U.S. zone there were nine, mostly
fortnightly. Denazification had made the work almost
impossible, as ex-regular officers could not be used as
leaders. The amnesty for youth was, at that time, hang-
ing fire: and there had been the utmost difficulty in
sending a few representatives of the new German youth,
as they should be sent, out of the zone. On the regional
level, I was informed in North Rhine-Westphalia that
there were no books, magazines, handicraft materials,
indoor games, or outdoor sports equipment for youth
work, and no special allocation of fuel for meeting places.
This is the general picture; and while of course the
difficulty of priorities must always be kept in mind, my

16

impression was that youth work was very near the bottom
of them, whereas it ought to be not far from the top.

If the reader finds in the text nothing about these
questions, or that of elementary, secondary and university
education, this is certainly not because I underestimate
their importance.

Any section that has already appeared in the Press is
suitably labelled, and I take this opportunity of thanking
The Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Manchester
Guardian, The Observer, The News Chronicle, The Daily
Herald and The New Statesman for permission to reprint.
It does not follow that the original is reproduced
exactly : I have cut out, added and combined. But in no
case have I found it necessary to correct either a fact or
an expression of opinion as the result of anything that has
been written or said since my return to England.

I would add that all the photographs were taken in my
presence, except where I have stated to the contrary on
the reproductions. I must beg pardon for the intrusion into
some of them of my body, hand or even face. I thought
that my visible presence would add verisimilitude, and
obviate the charge, for instance, that these were really
agency photographs taken in China in the year 1932.

It will be appreciated that I have written through-
out of the position as I found it in October and early
November. The future is governed partly by that position,
and partly by the Anglo-American fusion arrangements
which have just been announced, and which must build
on the existing situation. Clearly some of the evils that I
attempt to describe will be remedied, if only partially, by
these arrangements. The question is, how many and how
partially? The New Statesman has rightly said that accept-
ance or rejection was a choice of evils, but has wrongly, in
my view, concluded that there is more to be said against

*7

than for. I think, on the contrary, that there is more to
be said for than against — but only just. Clearly, the dis-
astrous raw materials position will be to a certain extent
remedied : there will be some sort of import-export pro-
gramme: and financial reform is at least mentioned,
albeit quite barely and without even a hint of the kind of
plan to be adopted — probably because no such plan yet
exists. All this is to the good ; but there is a great deal that
is very bad indeed. I deal with the question of food in the
text. Hardly less and perhaps in the long run even more
important, the plan appears to be based on the March
“level of industry”, which would be disastrous in a unified
and intact Reich, but is sheer lunacy in the Anglo-
American trunk for which we are admittedly legislating.
To judge from the proposed credits, the import programme
will be far too meagre to allow of real recovery, given the
appalling position at present existing. Moreover, Anglo-
American co-operation will bring its own special problems.
Mr. Bevin and Mr. Dalton insist that the nationalization
of key industries in the British zone is not in any way
prejudiced, but it seems to me clear that American
influence will be all in the other direction, and good
intentions will be hard put to it if they are to get the better
of American intransigence. Again, the same American
influence will strengthen reactionary tendencies towards a
disastrous economic particularism in the Lander, and,
more generally, will encourage the stupid federalism which
must beat itself in vain against the logic of history. A
federal Europe, a hundred times yes : an atomized Ger-
many in an unfederalized Europe, danger and folly.

And, fusion or no fusion, a great deal of the present
trouble can be remedied by ourselves alone, and only by
radical changes both in the spirit with which we approach
our task and in the method and machinery of administra-
tion. Here we have conspicuously failed. This is not
intended as a criticism of Mr. Hynd, who is named

more than once in the following pages, but only because,
being the Minister responsible, he must inevitably bear
the weight of attack. There is no humaner man in British
public life, and no one whose attitude to the German
problem has been, not merely since the end of the war but
long before it, more consistently generous and sensible:
but a man of these qualities, even if of supreme ability,
could achieve little without a revolution in policy far
above his head.

I want to add a few words which may appear personal,
but are in fact written in the name of all those, at first
very few but now a rapidly growing number, who have
been trying, some for as long as eighteen months, to bring
to the public attention the facts about Germany. We
have been charged with prefening enemies to friends,
ignoring the sufferings of the Indians, the Chinese, the
Greeks, the Poles or the Yugoslavs, and generally behaving
like irresponsible featherheads. We repudiate this charge,
which is ridiculous. I personally was chairman of the
China Campaign Committee from the mid-thirties to
towards the end of the war, founded with Eleanor Rath-
bone the National Committee for Rescue from Nazi
Terror in 1942, and in the years before the war published
a whole series of books and made many hundreds of
speeches about the abominable rapes of Austria and
Czechoslovakia and about fascist wickedness in Spain.
If we have had to concentrate the major part of our
energy on Germany during the last eighteen months, that
is not because we believe that Germans are more important
than anyone else : it is because we believe that they are not
less important, and because they had few, and at first
very few, to appeal in their name to the decency of the
world. We further felt that as nationals of an occupying
Power that had enforced unconditional surrender we had
a very special responsibility before the bars of history and

*9

of our own consciences; and we reflected that, if every
German was indeed responsible for what happened at
Belsen, then we, as members of a democratic country
and not of a fascist one with no free Press or parliament,
were responsible individually as well as collectively for
refusing to tolerate anything that might be considered
even remotely comparable with Belsen, if only by way of
rhetoric. There was the further fact that, in the matter
of food, Unrra was doing at least something for other
countries, but nothing at all for Germany, where in the
absence of any government of her own effective aid could
come only from those allied countries which, by a deliber-
ate act of policy, had stripped her of great food-pro-
ducing territories.

I have written this, as I say, in the name of my colleagues
in “Save Europe Now”, of a growing band of Members of
Parliament, and of the few exceptional newspaper corre-
spondents, such as those of The Times and The Manchester
Guardian, who for so many months have been waging an
unceasing fight for decency and justice. But when it comes
to it I must add something that really is personal. As most
people are aware who are aware of me at all, I am a Jew:
and I am sometimes asked why, as a Jew, I bother about
people in whose name infamies have been committed
against my race, the memory of which, I fear— though I
would wish it otherwise — may never die. I am sometimes
asked this, I regret to say, by fellow-Jews who have for-
gotten, if they ever knew, the teaching of our prophets.
It has also been suggested that in my work for the Germans
I am, in some deliberate and offensively self-conscious
sense, heaping “coals of fire”. I wouldn’t much mind if
this were true, for what matters is not a man’s motive but
any practical result that may follow from his work — and
in the present case that, I am sorry to say, has so far been
distressingly small. The charge, however, is untrue and
ludicrous. It is indeed a fact that I feel called upon to help

20

suffering Germans precisely because I am a Jew : but not
at all for the reason imagined. It is a question neither of
“coals of fire” nor of what is called, and so often miscalled,
sentimentality. It is a question rather of plain, straight
commonsense, undeflected by that very sentimentality
which deflects the judgment and corrupts the spirit of so
many. To me three propositions seem self-evident. The
first is that nothing can save the world but a general act
of repentance in place of the present self-righteous
insistence on the wickedness of others; for we have all
sinned, and continue to sin most horribly. The second is
that good treatment and not bad treatment makes men
good. And the third is — to drop into the hideous collective
language which is now so much the mode — that unless
you treat a man well when he has treated you ill you just
get nowhere, or rather you give further impetus to evil
and head straight for human annihilation. People talk,
or used to talk, of the mission of Israel. This mission, if it
exists, is not to blow up people in Palestine ; our mission is,
just because we have been specially insulted and outraged
for i ,900 years or more, to be specially ready for reconcilia-
tion. I say this in no spirit of criticism of those, whether
they be Jews or Frenchmen or Czechs or Poles, whose sons
or wives or lovers have suffered such agony and shame that
even now one dare not think of it, and who can therefore
neither forget nor forgive. I understand very well the
thoughts and feelings that are their daily portion. But
just because this awful legacy of hatred is, for our poor
humanity, all but inevitable, so much the more incumbent
is it upon those of us who have suffered only vicariously, if
at all, to balance their bitterness by our well-wishing.

Once or twice, in Germany, I found that it was more
than well-wishing. In what follows the reader will find, as
a description of what I felt in Jiilich, the word “affection”.
I thought it significant that the article in which the word
occurs was rejected by the two papers to which I offered

21

it, whereas everything else was immediately accepted. I
wondered whether I had better cut the word right out,
and also the epithet “dear” which occurs in a letter from
Hamburg. But then I remembered that I was trying to give
a truthful account not only of what I saw but also of what I
felt : and I reflected that most of the objectors, if they had
been with me on the spot, would have found what I found —
namely that, in the hearts of those who have been so for-
tunate as to remain unembittered by the tragedy of life,
the presence of suffering evokes a kind of love. So I decided
to print and be damned.

V. G.

14 Henrietta Street,

Dec. 13th, 1946.

22

IN DARKEST GERMANY

I

FOOD AND HEALTH

5 (i)

BRITAIN AND DUSSELDORF

To the Editor of The Times.

Sir, — Here in this ruined city, where we as conquerors
are presumably responsible for at any rate the bare neces-
sities of the population, it is impossible to read Mr.
Strachey’s Dundee speech on the food position in England
without an almost unbearable sense of shame. Even after
rationing, says the Minister, we are eating a little more
flour as bread and cakes than before the war, 98 per cent,
as much meat, and nearly 50 per cent, more fish.

Though, say, 80 per cent, of the town population in our
zone of Germany supplements the official ration by a few
hundred calories — through the black market, which is
keeping people alive, or from other sources — the condition
of millions is indescribably wretched. One expert whose
job it is to make an assessment of such things estimates that
in the city of Hamburg some 100,000 people are suffering
from hunger oedema or the equivalent ; and according to
figures given to me by the German public health authori-
ties 13,000 people in Regierungsbezirk Diisseldorf were
being treated for this illness in hospitals or by private prac-
titioners during the month of September. I saw at a hospi-
tal in Hamburg a starving man who had been brought in a
few hours before : his death-rattle was beginning. I had a
photograph of him taken — with me by his side, to save
myself from the charge of exaggeration. I saw another

2 5

man in the same hospital whose swollen scrotum reached a
third of the way to the floor. I have a photograph of him
also.*

I have just returned from visiting a “bunker” — a huge
air-raid shelter, without daylight or air, where 800 chil-
dren get their schooling (Plates 1-3). In one class of 41
children, 23 had had no breakfast, and nothing whatever
to eat until half-past two, when they had had the school
meal of half a litre of soup, without bread. Exceptionally
it was pea soup to-day ; it is usually “biscuit soup”. Seven
of these children had the ugly skin-blemishes that are
mixed up in some way with malnutrition ; all were white
and pasty. Their gaping “shoes” — these, too, have been
photographed — mean the end of what little health they
have when the wet weather comes.

Particularly horrible is the growth of tuberculosis. It
is difficult to arrive at exact figures owing to imperfect
systems of notification in some places. But in Hamburg it
is certain that active lung tuberculosis is at least five times
as prevalent as before the war, and it may even be ten times
as prevalent. The number of active cases registered in
that city at the end of 1944 was 9,886 ; at the end of 1945,
12,013; and on July 1st 1946, 16,808. As only cases in
hospitals and dispensaries are registered, these figures in-
dicate the appalling growth of the disease, but not, of
course, the real total of suffering persons.

There are two main reasons for this increase in tuber-
culosis — malnutrition and overcrowding. In the British
zone 12,000 people with open, infectious tuberculosis live
in the same room with others — sometimes in the same bed

* I have decided at the last minute, after a great deal of hesitation,
to suppress the photographs of these two cases, except that of the
second man’s face (Plate 4). I have similarly suppressed all other
photographs of really bad cases of oedema where the water is
still present, as I cannot bear to perpetuate a visible record of these
horrors. (In hunger oedema the body swells, sometimes abominably,
with water.) I have retained a photograph of a less terrible case of
emaciation, and one or two of oedema where the water has gone.

26

with children. I shall make no attempt to describe housing
conditions — your readers would not believe me. But I
shall show my photographs when I return to England.

Apart from better housing, it is, above all, more meat
that is required if an increasingly rapid growth of tuber-
culosis is to be prevented. Must we eat 98 per cent, of the
meat we ate in England before the war, when we are at the
same time eating more bread and nearly 50 per cent, more
fish? Even a very small cut would make such a difference
to the 23,000,000 Germans in our charge. And I am told
by experts that if we make the “sacrifice”, the amount so
saved could come to the Germans — -there would be no
difficulty with the International Emergency Food Council.

The people in the cellars and bunkers of ruined Ger-
many, and particularly the women and children, are for
the most part wonderfully brave, and “break down” only
when they are given a bar of chocolate, or whatever it may
be, by a shamefaced visitor. If Mr. Attlee would only
come out here and see for himself, it is inconceivable that
he would maintain the ban on private food parcels.

Yours, &c.,

Victor Gollancz.

Dusseldorf, Oct. 30.

§ (>0

HUNGER CEDEMA

[My letter to The Times of October 30th produced a
reply from some distinguished Unrra consultants. They
challenged my figures, not explicitly but by implication,
but seemed most concerned to emphasise the claims of
Unrra countries.]

To the Editor of The Times.

Sir, — No one could have more sympathy than I with the
motive of Dr. Meiklejohn and his colleagues, which is, I
am sure, not to minimize the plight of the Germans but

2 7

to avert disaster from eastern Europe, now so gravely
menaced by the disgraceful decision to close down Unrra.
While, however, the motive is admirable, the method
seems to me less satisfactory. Figures are quoted with no
apparent understanding of their nature and meaning.
During the six weeks of my visit to the British zone, on the
other hand, I have laboriously checked and checked again
every fact and figure given to me both by British and Ger-
man authorities, and have refrained from putting pen to
paper until I have satisfied myself that I have correctly
appreciated the position. On the question of tuberculosis,
for instance, I have spent many days “digging down” and
attempting to discover what may be the truth underlying
the many conflicting views presented to me. My statement
that “active lung tuberculosis in Hamburg is at least five
times as prevalent as before the war” is, I am persuaded,
correct.

Space will permit me to deal with only one point in
detail— namely, that of hunger oedema. “Certainly the
situation [in Hamburg] must have deteriorated in a most
alarming fashion since the end of July,” write your corre-
spondents, “when the Control Commission reported 1,189
cases of hunger oedema in the city.” But these were hos-
pitalized cases. You must first add the non-hospitalized
cases ; and the relation of the one figure to the other, which
no doubt varies from place to place, may be gauged from
the fact that in certain districts of the North Rhine pro-
vince, for the period from July 1 to October 19, there were
48 known but non-hospitalized cases for every one hos-
pitalized case. And when you have done that you must
further add the cases that come to no one’s attention, but
can be estimated from surveys.

It is not a question of old ladies with varicose veins.
I have personally seen only two women with hunger
oedema, though I have seen many who are painfully
emaciated. Some indication of the true position is pro-

vided by a survey recently made (under British auspices)
of the nutritional state of about 1,000 employees of the
Reichspost Direktion, Hamburg. In males of all ages the
incidence of hunger oedema was found to be no less than
1 7 per cent., and in females of all ages 9 per cent. These
are horrifying figures. “This is a clinical assessment,” says
the report, “in which there was always a higher incidence
among persons examined in the afternoons, and this
regardless of whether or not theirs was a sedentary job.
The incidence of this cardinal sign of malnutrition must
therefore be even higher in fact. Further, it should be
borne in mind that among large numbers of persons in the
same general state of under-nourishment necessitating
hospitalization little more than half do manifest this sign.”
It was to the latter fact that I referred when I wrote
“hunger oedema or its equivalent”. No less than 52 per
cent, of the males and 34 per cent, of the females in the
same group showed “marked loss of flesh”, and 24 per cent,
of the males and 22 per cent, of the females “looked posi-
tively ill”.

Finally, your correspondents question the figure of
13,000 officially given by German public health authori-
ties as the number of people in Regierungsbezirk Dussel-
dorf being treated for hunger oedema in hospitals or
privately during September. This scepticism is not shared,
apparently, by responsible British officials on the spot.
“Recent surveys by Public Health in the Regierungsbezirk
Dusseldorf,” reported the Colonel commanding R.B.
Dusseldorf to the Deputy Regional Commissioner in June,
“showed that the number of hospitalized cases of people
suffering from hunger oedema was comparatively low,
the reason being shortage of beds. The number of non-
hospitalized cases is high — -in the region of 25,000.”

Allow me to add a word in conclusion. The most
horrible of my experiences has been a visit to the camp at
Belsen, where I saw the tattoo marks on the arms of the

2 9

Jewish survivors. I am never likely to forget the unspeak-
able wickedness of which the Nazis were guilty. But when
I see the swollen bodies and living skeletons in hospitals
here and elsewhere; when I look at the miserable “shoes”
of boys and girls in the schools, and find that they have
come to their lessons without even a dry piece of bread for
breakfast ; when I go down into a one-roomed cellar where
a mother is struggling, and struggling very bravely, to do
her best for a husband and four or five children — then I
think, not of Germans, but of men and women. I am sure
I should have the same feelings if I were in Greece or
Poland. But I happen to be in Germany, and write of
what I sec here.

Yours, &c.,

Victor Gollancz.

Diisseldorf, Nov. 12.

§ (iii)

TURKEYS AND STARVATION

To the Editor of The News Chronicle.

Sir, — The shamelessness of the Government becomes in-
tolerable. Turkeys and poultry specially imported, extra
meat, sweets and sugar— these are among the luxuries
which Mr. Strachey announces for Christmas. I don’t
know what sort of part my friend Strachey has played in
making this monstrous decision ; if any part at all, he is not
the Strachey I worked with for so many years.

Have these Christian statesmen of ours the slightest idea
of what is going on in Germany? Apparently not, for if
they had they would not make the idiotic statements that
cause such consternation among intelligent members of
the Control Commission. Let me tell them, then, some-
thing about life here in this ruined city of Diisseldorf.

The normal consumer’s ration is supposed to be one of

3 °

1,550 calories a day — about half ours in England. But this
week four of the items that account for most of this bogus
figure — bread, cereals, skim milk, and even vegetables —
are either non-existent or in horribly short supply; and
the same has been the case, in varying degree, ever since
I’ve been here.

The bread famine has meant that after standing in the
queue hour after hour and day after day since six o’clock in
the morning — and it is now vilely cold — many have been
turned away empty handed. In Wuppertal there was no
bread at all for io days.

The plain fact is that that portion of the Dtisseldorf
population that cannot, or will not, supplement the ration
by a few hundred extra calories from the black market or
other sources — the old, the feeble, the lonely, the very poor,
the hardest working and the over-conscientious — have been
living these last days on anything from 400 to 1,000
calories. Four hundred — and I have been in many homes
where this has been the daily ration — is half the Belsen
figure.

I wish Mr. Attlee, Lord Pakenham — whose speech in the
Lords was a model of feebleness and futility — and Mr.
Strachey could have been with me a couple of days ago in
the big hospital here, when I spent a ghastly morning
photographing cases of hunger oedema and emaciation.
I cannot believe that they would not have been as sickened
as I was.

Our prestige here is pretty near the nadir. The youth is
being poisoned and renazified. We have all but lost the
peace— and I fear that this is an understatement.

Yours, &c.,

Victor Gollancz.

Dtisseldorf, November 8.

3 1

§ (iv)

A REPLY TO MR. STRAGHEY

[A reply by Mr. Strachey was published in The News
Chronicle the day after the above letter appeared. Next day
Mr. Cummings commented.]

To the Editor of The News Chronicle.

Sir >— A. J. Cummings says that “it is absurd, as well as
grossly unfair, to suggest that the British Government is in-
different to elementary human needs in the British Zone”.
It is not absurd ; it is not unfair; it is the fact. Listen to this.

Private food parcels — to be made up from rationed
foods only, spared from his own ration by the would-be
donor — would be invaluable.

I don’t want anybody to tell me that they would hardly
touch the fringe of the problem; after six weeks in Ger-
many I know all about that a good deal better than many
of the objectors. But, first, every individual case is an
individual case, and if one person out of every hundred or
ten thousand can be spared extreme hunger, then that is
so much gain ; and, secondly, it is impossible to exagger-
ate what such gestures mean in giving evidence of human
solidarity.

American parcels are now beginning to arrive in our
zone, and I have personal experience of what they mean
to the recipients. That the Americans are sending parcels
and we are not will be still another count against us ; and
this will be doubly lamentable in view of the fact that the
American all-over failure is indeed far greater than ours.

Now what has happened about these food parcels? The
following. Save Europe Now” had been attempting for
months to get them sanctioned; and when Strachey re-
placed Ben Smith at the Ministry of Food it seemed certain
that the scheme would go through.

We worked out the details with officials of the Ministry

3 2

and the many other departments concerned at a number
of extremely tedious conferences.

Then the whole thing collapsed. Why? Because bread
rationing was introduced, and the Government, alarmed
by an outcry which was very largely as bogus and en-
gineered as it was in any event disgraceful, simply refused
to face the hypothetical charge that “in so grave a domes-
tic crisis” it was allowing food to go out of the country —
idiotic though such a charge would be, since every bit of
the food in question would simply be transferred from an
individual and willing consumer in England to an in-
dividual consumer in Germany.

I challenge both Attlee and Strachey to deny that this is
a true statement of the facts ; and I say that this is just one
example of indifference— or, if you like, comparative in-
difference — to elementary human needs in the British zone.

I see that Hynd has now made another of his famous
“optimistic” speeches. It will send a cold shiver down the
back of every intelligent member of the Control Com-
mission — as in the case of his recent Berlin effort, on the
very eve of the present appalling crisis in the Ruhr. Every-
one in Germany is asking : “Where on earth does Hynd get
his information from?”

As for John Strachey, he is so intelligent, and his reply so
feeble, that I must assume that he has got himself mixed
up with a policy of which he disapproves, and is making
the best of it.

What Germany must have, he says sagely, is not turkeys
or sweets, but regular cereals. He’s telling me ! But

(a) He misses the point that to give us extra Christmas
rations, over and above the high general standard of
living of which he talked with so much pride recently, is
morally degrading to ourselves and must add still further
to the growing cynicism with which the Germans regard
“Western democracy” ;

33

(b) The Germans need, God knows, the “variety” of
which Ben Smith had always a deal to say; and they
might have had a little of it, but for our selfishness, this
Christmas ;

(■ c ) They desperately need animal proteins. I believe I
am right in saying (but will not vouch for it, as I am away
from my documents) that if the Germans of our zone had
been given the amount of meat by which our ration was
recently increased, they would thereby have received a
regular additional 50 per cent.* And now we take still more
meat, as well as specially imported turkeys and poultry;
this extra Christmas ration of meat alone would suffice to
give four pounds to every child in the British zone. The
fact that the miserable German fish ration has been quietly
reduced for the current period makes matters worse ;

( d ) “You can’t feed ‘Germany’ on sweets.” How true !
But if Strachey had been with me when a Salvation Army
man gave sweets to some children in a miserable under-
ground cellar where they “live” he might have graspf d the
point.

The Cabinet, says Strachey, knows exactly what is
happening in Germany. No doubt ; but usually after it has
happened. How otherwise explain, among other things,
Hynd’s Berlin speech?

Yours, &c.,

Victor Gollancz.

14, Henrietta Street, November 16.

§ (v)

A REPLY TO MR. HYND

To the Editor of The Times.

Sir, — In the debate on Wednesday (November 27th)
Mr. Hynd, speaking about food in Germany, said : “I do

* The figure should be 70 per cent.

34

not think there is any difference between Mr. Gollancz
and myself.” There is a world of difference.

“The calculations upon which my statements are
based,” he continued, “are those of the actual amount of
food that has been distributed. . . . We have maintained
the ration steadily up to the present time, apart from local
breakdowns.” This is untrue.

On arriving in the Ruhr (October 27) I visited homes
and schools, and was horrified by what I found. Many
were living, the day I visited them, on a cup of milkless
“coffee” for breakfast, potatoes with cabbage for lunch,
and the same in the evening, bread being entirely absent.

I then made official, but still local, inquiries. I first
discovered that the 1,550 calories were, even officially, a
myth. The ration is made up of 14 items : there is a printed
sheet showing the quantity of each item and the calorie
value of that quantity, and these calorie values add up to
1,548. But while the public is entitled to the printed
quantities in the case of 1 2 of the items, they are not so
entitled in the case of bread and cereals. In the case of
these two, the Press announces each week how much may
be bought. The amounts shown on the sheet as necessary
to make up the 1,550 calories are 10,000 grammes of bread
and 1,750 grammes of cereals for the 28 days. But during
the period which started on October 14 — the period for
which rations were officially raised to 1,550 calories— the
amount of bread to which the public was entitled, even
officially, was not 10,000 but 8,500 grammes; and the
coupons for cereals were not “called up,” in the official
phrase, at all except in an infinitesimal percentage for
special classes only. So the 1,548 calories have already
become 1,206.

But it was clear to me that many were not getting 1,206
calories or anything like it. So on November 8 I went to
Bonn and spent the day there with our Regional food
team, which is responsible for North Rhine-Westphalia. I

35

found a general impression that, though there had been
breakdowns for a few days here and there, the thing had
evened out and that over the whole period the 8,500
grammes of bread (but not, of course, the 10,000) were
being met. I was unable to accept this assurance, and it
was courteously agreed that certain towns should be rung
up with a view to discovering in each case the stock of
flour at the opening of the period, the amount necessary
to meet the ration (on the 8,500, not the 10,000, basis)
during the first three weeks of the period, the amount
actually received during those three weeks, and the closing
stock. When the results came through they showed a
deficiency in Diisseldorf of about 50 per cent, and in
Essen, Mulheim, Oberhausen, Duisburg, and Dinslaken,
taken as a group, a deficiency of about 35 per cent. It was
added that deliveries from small mills were not included,
but that these would not seriously affect the general
picture.

I then asked about cereals. The responsible officer
stated that these had been unobtainable for a considerable
period, that there was no possibility of an early resump-
tion of supplies, and that the back-log would have to be
written off.

I next inquired about skim milk. I was first told that 80
per cent, of the ration had been met. Again I could not
agree, and begged for inquiries. The reply came through
during the afternoon : over the whole North Rhine region
the deficiency since October 14 had been about 50 per
cent.

Mr. Hynd is the last man in the world to deceive the
House of Commons. What, then, is the explanation?

Yours, &c., Victor Gollancz.

14, Henrietta Street, Nov. 28.

3 6

§ (vi)

RATIONS AND THE FUSION PLAN

To the Editor of the Manchester Guardian.

Sir, — Mr. Dalton, announcing in the House on Decem-
ber 3 the plan for the fusion of the British and American
zones of Germany, said that “the food ration of 1,550
calories for the normal German consumer must be accep-
ted for the present, but will be raised to 1,800 calories as
soon as conditions of world supply permit.” This state-
ment will be read with the greatest disquiet. Several con-
siderations arise :

1. “A diet containing an average of about 2,650 calories
a day . . .” says the report of the Emergency Economic
Committee for Europe, issued on February 6, 1946, “has
been recommended by the U.N.R.R.A. Food Committee
as the amount of food sufficient to maintain full health
and efficiency in a population with a normal distribu-
tion according to sex, age, and occupation.” A diet of
1,800 calories for the normal consumer seems, there-
fore, a curious target, even if it is not the ultimate
one.

2. How long is the 1,550 scale to be retained? A week
or so ago a well-known and reliable correspondent of the
“Observer,” writing from Berlin after an interview with
responsible officials there, put the probable period at close
on another year. This is folly. “A diet of 1,200 calories,”
according t •> the fourth report from the Select Committee
on Estimates, House of Commons, November 5, 1946,
“may be characterised as slow starvation . . . 1,550
calories is probably no better than even slower starvation.”
Moreover, the Germans had been living for many months
on no more than 1,000 calories, and some of them, from
time to time, on considerably less. Against such a back-
ground the prolonged continuance of 1,550 calories must
inevitably involve a still more rapid deterioration in the

37

general health and in particular a progressively intensified
increase of active lung tuberculosis.

3. What arrangements are being made to ensure that
even the 1,550 calories will really be met? As everyone
knows, they were far from being met during the period
starting on October 14. For the following period, starting
on November 1 1 , a quota of cereals representing nearly 200
calories was put on the official sheet with a view to bring-
ing the total up to 1,550. But I was assured at the Regional
Food Headquarters in Bonn that these cereals would,
in fact, be virtually unobtainable.* Maintenance of the
ration will require a regular reserve of, at the very mini-
mum, a month’s supply of grain. Is this being provided
for? When it comes to our own country Mr. Strachey con-
siders a reserve of eight weeks the indispensable minimum.
Unless we cease to work on a hand-to-mouth basis there
will be constant repetitions of the disgraceful breakdown
I witnessed in Diisseldorf and the Ruhr.

4. How is the diet to be composed? In the period
starting October 14 the daily quota of visible fats for the
normal German consumer amounted to 6 grammes (7
grammes = J ounce), and that of protein to 43 -i grammes,
1 1-6 of which were animal protein. But I am informed by
a leading expert that for building up bodily resistance
70 grammes of protein are essential, of which 30 should
be animal protein, and that, while there is no definite

* The following answer by Mr. Hynd on December 1 1 is really
almost unbelievable. The “current” period, as at December 11, is
not the period starting November 1 1, which would be bad enough;
it is the period subsequent to that. Here are the question and answer :

Mr. Foot asked the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster what pro-
portion of the cereal ration in North Rhine-Westphalia was met
during the 28-day period beginning 14th October and is being met
in the current period ; and why has the cereal quota of the current
ration been retained at 1,500 grammes. Mr. J. Hynd: Since 14th
October only an insignificant proportion of the cereal ration, as dis-
tinct from bread, has been met in this region. I hope, however, that
imports of grain will soon be sufficient to enable the full rate of dis-
tribution to be resumed and the ration scale has therefore been re-
tained at 1,500 grammes.

38

evidence to prove that fats are necessary for health, it is,
in fact, extremely difficult to “live” on less than 20
grammes of visible fats a day.

This is the beginning of the end of our economic
problems,” said Mr. Bevin when announcing the plan.
Unless its food arrangements are drastically revised his
optimism will prove misguided. — Yours, &c.,

Victor Gollancz.

14, Henrietta Street,

December 4.

§ (vii)

MORE FACTS ABOUT HEALTH

It is easy enough to get a reliable general picture of the
state of what is called “public health” in Germany today.
No one could doubt that it is deplorable, except the sort
of person who concludes that nothing can be wrong if he
doesn’t see every second person dropping dead before his
eyes. But it is difficult to get accurate details. Opinions
vary a good deal about statistics and their meaning.
Some, but by no means all, of the British doctors (who
come largely, one gathers, from the R.A.M.G. and I.M.S.,
and a few of whom seem naturally predisposed to regard
every sick man as a malingerer) are suspicious of, or even
downright hostile to, their German confreres; and some,
but by no means all, of the German doctors tend to ex-
aggerate — which is certainly a fault in the better direction.
Within a few days of my arrival I had a remarkable inter-
view with a British medical officer of fair importance. He
started by advising me always to see English doctors; he
was so emphatic on the point that I realized at once how
important it was for me to see German doctors as well.
He agreed that “there wasn’t enough penicillin”, but his
own explanation — “the Germans can’t pay for it” —
appeared, in his view, to dispose of the matter once and
for all. I was to remember what he said when I saw a man

39

a few days later at the University Hospital of Hamburg,
in agony because there was no penicillin for him — you
can see his face for yourselves on plate 5. This doctor
also suggested that the German authorities had falsified
the V.D. figures — penicillin at that time being permitted
only for cases of gonorrhoea — “to get more penicillin”.
As to insulin, hospitals, he said, had 100 per cent, of their
requirements — “and bad cases presumably go to hos-
pital”. I was to remember this too, when I was told by a
German doctor whom I learned to trust that people
forced their way into hospitals when the coma was about
to come on in order to compel admittance. I next learned
that all the people suffering from oedema, for instance in
the Hamburg hospitals, were oldish — and so they might
really be suffering from other kinds of oedema, such as
cardiac or renal. So indeed this one or that one might;
but the general impression that the remark might have
conveyed to the unwary would have been wholly false,
as I shall presently show. I ended the interview by asking
whether any drugs etc. were in seriously short supply,
and if so what, and in what order of priority. I got a satis-
factorily categorical answer — penicillin, insulin, fiver ex-
tract, cod-liver oil and malt, vitamins A and D.

• • • • •

In Kiel I found a high proportion of the people with
grey and yellow faces, and I shall have something to say
about this later on. Here, also, I was to have my first
experience of a characteristic in the population that
literally forces itself more and more on your attention:
people drift about with such lassitude that you are always
in danger of running them down if you happen to be in a
car — as, being a Britisher, you almost invariably are.

On the day after my arrival in this city I went into the
tuberculosis figures for Schleswig-Holstein. Tuberculosis
is one of the things about which you have the greatest
difficulty in arriving at the truth, as I was soon to discover.

40

There are many reasons ; in Hamburg, for instance, until
a few weeks ago only open infectious cases were notified
and, as I mentioned in The Times, only cases in sanatoria
and hospitals were registered. The number of notified
and registered cases, therefore, is an imperfect guide to
the amount of active tuberculosis, even by way of compari-
son with 1939, as general conditions are now so much
worse, and in particular such hordes of “expellees” have
been flooding into our zone and so many doctors have been
“denazified” that there is likely to be a considerable
percentage of tuberculosis that never comes under notice
at all. Some attempts have been made here and there to
get an all-over picture by mass X-ray surveys of the
population; but these have to be treated with great
caution, first because the samples are small, and secondly
because a proportion of the “conspicuous pulmonary
findings” certainly indicate bronchitis, old healed cases,
cases in process of cure, etc. Nevertheless, these surveys
must be taken into account.

The number of new cases of active lung tuberculosis
registered in Schleswig-Holstein during the first six
months of 1946 was between four and five times the
number of new cases registered in the whole of 1939, and
more than five-sixths of the number registered in the whole
of 1945. The population is now double what it was in
1939. The registered figures for 1946, therefore, show
something between a four-fold and a five-fold increase
over 1939, after correcting the population statistics. After
a similar correction, deaths from the disease during the
first six months of 1946 come out as more numerous than
those for the whole of 1939. I think I am right in adding
that the monthly figures this year were rising steeply up
till August, with a small drop in September ; and that the
number of new cases registered in that month was more
than 60 per cent, higher than the numbers registered in
January and February respectively.

As to the real increase since 1939, a layman’s guess is
as good as a doctor’s, once he has had the whole thing
explained to him. My guess is that for Schleswig-
Holstein the increase is at least ten-fold, and probably far
more. The horde of “expellees” is one of the reasons, of
course, for the particularly bad situation in this Land.

Infant mortality in Schleswig-Holstein for the first
six months of 1946 was at the rate of 1 1 6- 1 per 1,000 live
births, against the 1 936 figure (for the Reich as a whole) of
66. But in the zone generally infant mortality is at the
moment declining: it was 136 per 1,000 live births in
January 1946 against 61 in January 1938, but only 75
(provisional figure) in August 1946 against 57 in August
1938. It is to be hoped that the winter will not see another
rapid increase.

An interesting report has been written by Dr. Walter
Biingeler, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Kiel
University, about general health conditions in Schleswig-
Holstein :

“The pathology of the post-war period is controlled
by the direct or indirect results of deficiency- and under-
nourishment, which are becoming increasingly evident
amongst the majority of the German population.
Among cases we have investigated death through
starvation has occurred only twice. Apart from this the
effects of undernourishment have been established by
the fact that all dead persons, even those who have died
as a result of an accident or some acute infection, have
been appallingly underweight. A 30% weight deficiency
is by no means uncommon. Especially in the spring and
summer of 1946 an enormous loss of substance in the
vital organs was most striking in a large number of post-
mortems. A 50% loss of weight in the liver and heart
was frequently noticed. Finally already in middle age
osteoporosis has been clearly established. . . .

4 2

“In the summer months of ’46 the indirect results of
deficient- and under-nourishment became far more
evident. To this category belongs also the increased
virulence of tuberculosis, with comparatively high
mortality, which has been proved in our clinics. In
almost all TB cases we find unusually disproportionate
weight and frequently symptoms which prove a loss of
immunity far exceeding the usual proportions (galloping
consumption, unusual symptoms of generalisations of
TB in adults).

“Furthermore septic infections frequently show un-
usual symptoms. Serious infections appear after re-
latively harmless staphylomykosis of the skin and flesh.
Also the individual symptoms which then appear show
emphatically the completely inadequate powers of
resistance of the body.

“This general lowering of immunity leads also to
loss of immunity and resistance in those organs whose
physiological task it is to protect the body, and which
now only show localised resistance in the form of inflam-
mation, instead of general resistance.

“In this connection must be mentioned the extra-
ordinary frequency, seriousness and persistence of skin
staphylomykosis since this winter. External hygienic
conditions have aggravated this tendency. The mucous
membrane of the stomach and intestinal canal is nor-
mally a barrier to germs. Genuine intestinal infections
have, however, not been so common as a result of
appropriate hygienic measures. Almost all typhoid cases
observed by us follow an extraordinary course. Clinical
observations confirm these findings. Various relapses have
been noticed, and even in serious typhoid cases, which
later led to death, the level of the agglutinations-titre
remained abnormally low or non-existent.

“All these observations explain to us the nature of
an intestinal infection which up to now was most rare,

43

but which has recently been increasing: acute or sub-
acute unspecified enteritis phlegmonosa.

“This disease was up till now so rare that every case
was given publicity. Up till 1923 forty cases were known
in Germany, in more recent times there were known in
Germany a few notifications. At the end of spring 1946
cases begin to appear again and they have meanwhile
reached alarming numbers. . . .”

From Kiel I went to Hamburg. One of my early visits
there was to an elementary school for girls, the age group
being 6 to 14. I saw three girls being medically examined.
The first had an underweight of 7 pounds, the second of 8,
and the third of 1 7, but my arrival had been expected and
these may perhaps have been specially selected cases. I
was told that there was a regular underweight in the school
of 8 pounds, and that there had been a great deterioration
since the ration cut in March; but I had no means of
checking this statement. The girl with the 17 pounds
underweight was very small for her age, and pot-bellied.
It was at this school that I first saw the horrible skin
blemishes which I was later to see in all the schools I
visited. The headmistress told me that 50 per cent, of her
children suffered from them, and from counts I personally
made elsewhere I should say that this was not a very
serious exaggeration. The complaint takes various forms :
very small red marks over a large area of the body, sores
of the impetigo type, and small flat carbuncles which half
heal and then break out again. My own view is that dirt
and lack of soap are the origin, but that immunity is
reduced, the trouble aggravated and a cure prevented by
malnutrition, and in particular by the lack of meat,
cheese, milk and eggs.

I went on to an elementary school for boys, where I
saw children chosen for a “recovery home”. You will find
a photograph of some of them on plates 6 and 7.

44

I have already given the Hamburg tuberculosis figures
in my letters to The Times. I would only add that the
figure of five times pre-war is, in my view, a very con-
servative one, and was arrived at after several very lengthy
cross-examinations. Two supplementary figures are oi
interest. The official British public health review for
Hamburg, January to June 1946, states that 5,321 new
cases of active TB were registered at clinics during these
6 months, against 5>8 i 8 for the whole previous year; and
in one Hamburg hospital for children, out of 425 beds
occupied in 1939 there were 20 cases of tuberculosis,
whereas in the same hospital, with approximately the
same number of beds, these cases now number 170. I was
assured that this was a fair sample, and that it conveyed a
terrible warning; for children catch tuberculosis far more
easily than adults from living in the same room with the
infectious. In general, the present overcrowding means a
progressive infection — one person infects two or three
others, and so it goes on. Owing to shortage of beds in
sanatoria urgent cases cannot be taken in ; and people who
in normal times would be isolated in a room at home are
now living and sleeping with three, five, eight others.
Unless this process stops, no one can see the end. “About
4,000 cases of infectious tuberculosis”, says the Hamburg
report already referred to, “were being nursed in their
own houses, and under the bad and overcrowded housing
conditions constituted a serious menace.” The reference is,
of course, only to known cases.

There was an improvement in the infant mortality rate
for Hamburg similar to that for Schleswig-Holstein. It was
(approximately) 50 per 1,000 live births in 1938, 145 in
r 945> 125 in January 1946, 77 in March 1946, 114 in
April 1946, 82 in June 1946, and 84 in July 1946. Mis-
carriages, on the other hand, which according to statistics
of the Hamburg Health Authority were 12-2 per cent, of
reported pregnancies in 1940 and increased about 1 per

45

cent, a year till the end of 1945, when they reached 17-7 per
cent., jumped during the first six months of 1946 to 20-1
per cent. A gynaecologist, with a practice in middle-class
and intellectual circles, attributed the increase to food
shortage, insufficient clothing, lack of fuel, bad housing
conditions, homes overcrowded with strangers, queuing
up by the hour for food, inadequate transport facilities,
and overcrowded trains. His report continues :

“All this results in general in a considerable lowering
of women’s power of resistance and energy, and in
particular it affects the female generative organs.

“Otherwise thoroughly healthy young women and
girls suffer to an alarming extent from hypoplasia uteri.
This is partly the result of shocks received during air
raids, partly caused by the unfavourable change in the
mode of living and by the barely sufficient one-sided
food. It is very alarming in so far as it is a bad prog-
nostic for conception. The treatment is very much
impaired by the lack of all hormone preparations and
the impossibility to send the women to suitable convales-
cent homes. That is where help is urgently needed.

“Inflammatory diseases of the abdominal organs,
especially chronic catarrhs of the vagina, inflammations
of the bladder, and nephritis, have to be increasingly
dealt with during consulting hours. In many cases they
are the result of staying insufficiently clothed in unheated
rooms. The rise in gonococcal infections is very serious.

“The wish to have a child is waning. Instead of
desiring a child many women are now succumbing to a
deep despondency, thus the diagnosis of a new preg-
nancy often arouses fits of despair. The women are
weighed down by the anxiety how to procure the most
necessary things for the expected baby. There are no
beds, no bedding, no baby-clothes and diapers. On
account of the bad housing conditions a confinement at

46

home is generally out of the question, and the maternity
wards are overcrowded. . . .

“Abortions are on the increase. Admission and pro-
duction of contraceptives are urgently required in the
present times of distress in order to restrict to a minimum
illegal interruptions of gravidity which are often very
detrimental to the health of the women.”

This specialist’s reference to abortion is confirmed from
other sources; in one city I was told “The doctors are
living on abortion.”

As to hunger oedema in Hamburg, there is little to add
to what I have written in The Times. I am satisfied that
the estimate of 100,000 is a reasonable one ; and it must be
remembered that the survey of post-office workers was
carried out under expert British auspices, and that but for
it the existence of the majority of such cases would prob-
ably never have been known. The survey makes nonsense,
of course, of the “old people with renal and cardiac
oedema” argument. When the reader looks at the photo-
graphs of cases of oedema and emaciation which I took in
various hospitals,* he must bear in mind that doctors are
sometimes in error, and that this case or that may in fact
be due, for instance, to kidney trouble or cancer. But the
point is that this is what bad cases of oedema and emacia-
tion look like, and that a very high percentage of them are
unquestionably caused by starvation. I will give further
proof of this later on.

Fortnightly weighings of industrial workers have been
undertaken in Hamburg. Though the report of the Welfare
Committee responsible for them states that the figures are
“average figures of such a great group of population that
they give a true picture of the loss of weight” I quote the
findings with all reserve, as I lacked the time to investi-
gate the expertise of the body in question. The figures, as

* I have suppressed most of these. See p. 24.

47

at the end of June 1946, show an average loss varying, in
different groups of men and women, from 8 per cent, to
15 per cent. The weighings of children show no loss of
weight up to 5 years of age, and average losses in other
groups varying from 3 to 10 per cent. Weighings in old
people’s homes show an average loss of 20 per cent, for
both men and women.

• • • • •

On October 15 I paid a visit to the University Hospital
of Hamburg, where I took photographs. A chart prepared
by Professor Jorez showed that of males weighed on
admittance in 1939, whatever their complaint, 25-7 per
cent, were overweight, 15 per cent, more than 5 kilos
underweight, and a further 12-8 per cent, more than
10 kilos (about a stone and a half) underweight. Similar
weighings in June 1946 showed i-8 per cent, overweight,
19-4 per cent, more than 5 kilos underweight, and a
further 49-3 per cent, more than 10 kilos underweight.
These figures may be considered reliable. The Professor
also informed me that the weight of mentally deficient
children at the Alsterdorf Anstalt was generally normal
in 1939, but in the second quarter of 1946 was deficient
in the case of girls by an average of 6 kilos and in the case
of boys by an average of 9J kilos (again, nearly a stone
and a half) ; and that the mortality rate in this institution
had increased from roughly 1 to roughly 5 per cent.

I enquired about the rations of hunger oedema patients.
I was told that these, even for the worst cases, amounted
to only 2,300 calories. I would remind the reader that in
England the average calories are at the moment just on
3 ,° 0 °.

From Hamburg I went to Dusseldorf and the Ruhr. I
will give first the public health figures for the North Rhine
Province as given me in a document dated November 6th
and prepared by the German M.O.H., Dr. Gerfeldt.

48

Population: October 1939, 6,500,000; September

1946, 5,947,000, including about 250,000 refugees. Active
cases of tuberculosis on the register: 31st December 1944,
9,902 ; 3 1 st December 1945, 19,102 ; 30th June 1946,25,000.
This information was supplemented verbally at a con-
ference with Dr. Gerfeldt and other leading German
public health officials. They stated that the real figure was
probably about 33 J per cent, higher than the one shown ;
that 6,000 known cases of infectious tuberculosis were not
isolated : and that at a clinic for all children’s diseases in
Stadtkreis Diisseldorf the number of cases of tuberculosis
was about two and a half times as high on September
30th 1946 as on January 1st 1939. There was a similar rise
in the death rate from children’s tuberculosis in this
institution.

At the same conference I was given body-weights in
the North Rhine Province, as follows. Children from 6-12 :
in Diisseldorf (I think the Regierungsbezirk, but possibly
the town only), normal 81-4%, middle (loss of weightless
than 3%) 4-8%, bad (loss of weight more than 3%) 14%.
In Cologne, normal 11-7%, middle 58-8%, bad 29-5%.
In Regierungsbezirk Aachen, normal 9%, middle 23%,
bad 68%. In the whole Land North Rhine-Westphalia,
average underweight in men 8-5% and in women 7-5%.

The British public health authorities added the informa-
tion that in North Rhine-Westphalia the total number of
known infectious cases of tuberculosis at the end of June
was 23,500, but the number of beds in hospitals and
sanatoria only 10,066. They further stated that in North
Rhine, while there had been little increase in new registered
cases as between January and June 1946, there had been
an increase of nearly 33^ per cent, in open and infectious
cases during the same period. The Friends Relief Service
have recently reported from Dortmund that in Landkreis
Iserlohn nearly 33 £ per cent, of all the children examined
there were TB positive.

49

While in Diisseldorf I visited three ordinary schools,
as well as the bunker school referred to in the Times
correspondence. In a class of 45 boys aged 6 or 7, only one,
I thought, looked healthy. Many were clearly under-
nourished, and there was a plague of spots and sores. In
another mixed class of children of 13 or so the under-
nourishment of all the boys without exception was even
more noticeable; most of the girls, on the other hand,
looked fairly normal. Many of the boys had swollen glands.
I had a few undressed. Photographs will be found on
plates 14 and 15.

I spent November 2 at Oberhausen, a typical mining
town. Mr. Buist, the Times correspondent, and I got away
from the officials and entered miners’ flats at random. In
two tiny rooms we found a mother and father, a baby that
looked as if it wouldn’t live, and three other children.
Two of the children were barefoot ; the other had a pair of
house-shoes borrowed from the man’s father-in-law. By
way of bedclothes there were 3 blankets for the whole
family and nothing more. The miner had money, but no
Bezugsmarken; he had done his best to get them but without
success. It must be explained that you can’t just go into a
shop and try to buy a shoe or almost any other personal or
household necessity ; you have first to obtain a Bezugsmark,
or coupon, which you may — but usually do not — receive
on proof of need. If and when you have got it you then
have to go from shop to shop — sometimes, recently, even
from town to town — to try to get the article.

I suspected what these children would look like naked,
and was horribly tom between shame at asking to photo-
graph them and desire to bring conditions like this home
to the British public. When I asked the mother’s per-
mission she broke down and was comforted with difficulty
by Buist, who however eventually persuaded her that this
might be a way to help Germany. You will find the
photographs on plates 16 and 17.

5 °

Back in Diisseldorf, I spent a morning (November 5th)
at the Town Hospital. I saw a few very badly underweight
children there — the trouble was, the doctor said, that they
had to be sent home without proper shoes and clothes,
and so got ill again. I also saw a child of ten with heavy
TB — the kind of TB, I was told, that you find normally
only in babies. The disease was spread over the whole
body, and bandages could be changed only under
morphia. Such cases, it appeared, were today much
commoner in older children. Previously there had not
been enough to fill the building; now another building,
as well as this, was full. Photograph on plate 18.

One of the patients at this hospital was its own lady
doctor. She lived alone, was too busy to get food from the
Black Market, and couldn’t queue up ; so she had had no
bread for weeks. She was now recovering slowly from
hunger oedema.

At the baby clinic attached to this hospital I was told
that only one in three mothers could feed her baby
properly ; the breasts of the others were dry within a week.

Later in the day I had a talk with Dr. Arnold, the
Burgomaster of Diisseldorf and one of the half dozen best
Germans I met. During the last few weeks, he said, he had
been visiting factories and workshops, and had personally
examined people in Stadtkreis and Landkreis Diisseldorf,
as well as in Essen, Bochum and the Ruhr generally. The
condition of the men was so bad that their working
capacity was on the verge of collapse. He had noticed that
when miners and metal workers were bathing at a distance
of 8 yards he could count their ribs. He had been told by
factory doctors that within a period of three months there
had been losses of 15 to 20 lbs.

Dr. Amelunxen, the Minister-President of North Rhine-
Westphalia, spoke in a similar sense. He was convinced
that during the next few years two or three million would
die as a direct result of present conditions — old people, the

5 1

tuberculous, and a very large number of young children
who would fail to overcome the normal childish diseases.
Many senior British officials are equally alarmed. “There
is a general deterioration in the health of the population”
wrote the Colonel commanding Regierungsbezirk Diissel-
dorf to the Deputy Regional Commissioner on June 25th
and in their ability to resist disease, which is having an
adverse effect on their morale. There is a considerable
increase in the number of cases of hunger oedema in the
larger towns in the R.B., notably among women and old
people and business men who are at work all day. Still-
births are on the increase. . . . Simple ailments, such as
colds, boils, carbuncles etc., which would normally be
treated at home, have now to be treated in hospital,
and complications often follow. People have been seen
collapsing while waiting in queues, and for the Dusseldorf
ferry. He proceeds to give some particulars from Essen,
Wuppertal, Oberhausen, Solingen, Dusseldorf, Mulheim
and Remscheid. “In Dusseldorf on 19th May there were
145 cases of hunger oedema in one hospital (Grafenberg).
° f 934 persons reported to one of the Stadtkreis Medical
Officers, 206 were found to be suffering from hunger
oedema, and only 70 were in normal health.” “In Mul-
heim average loss of weight in hospital 20%. Increase in
number of hospital patients in one year 18% to 20%.”
“In Remscheid definitely undernourished in April 6,648,
in May 7,259. Suffering from lack of albumen April
I ,732, May 1,792.” Then follows the estimate of 25,000
as the number of persons in the R.B. suffering from
hunger oedema, which I quoted in my letter to The Times.

I thought I would round off the whole investigation by
having a talk with a world-famous British expert on
nutrition, who was doing special work in the neighbour-
hood on hunger oedema. He was as cautious as a scientist
no doubt should be, and he had a poor opinion of the
veracity of Germans in general and of German scientists in

particular. Nevertheless, the upshot was substantially to
confirm my own conclusions. He could not say whether
the prevalence of spots and sores was due in some degree to
malnutrition. He agreed that the majority of adults you
saw about looked yellow (as well as thin) ; but the reason,
he said, was not clear to him. If I understood him aright,
he thought that the yellow, parchmenty appearance might
be caused by a failure of the blood to flush the skin. “A
sort of defence mechanism” suggested one of his assistants.
But when I put a direct question, the answer was a frank
“Of course, it’s connected in some way with malnutrition”.
As to oedema, he explained, as so many others had ex-
plained already, that only some of it was hunger oedema,
and that this type could easily be identified by its quick
response to extra food. Later on in the conversation, when
I was asking another question about oedema, “You’d be
surprised” I was told “how many of the cases that pass
through my hands improve very rapidly when quite a
small amount of additional food is given.” These cases,
then, must have been hunger oedema.

All this doesn’t mean, as I said at the beginning, that
people are dropping dead in the streets. The crude
mortality rate has been improving and in August was
normal. The point is that a very great number of people
feel wretchedly weak and ill, and that the health of the
population as a whole is being undermined with such
startling rapidity that, unless radical measures are taken
to effect an improvement, the toll in one, two or three
years’ time will be appalling. It must be remembered that
mortality from tuberculosis did not reach its climax until
five years after the last war. Even the increasing prevalence
of infectious diseases is not the most important aspect of
the matter, serious though this is. In the Control Com-
mission’s information room at Birnde there is a chart
headed “Diseases of the German Population”, and show-
ing a graph of seven diseases with March 30 1946 as the

53

first date and September 14 as the last. Scarlet fever is about
the same on the later date as on the earlier, dysentery also
about the same, diphtheria a trifle higher, gonorrhoea
considerably higher, syphilis much higher, tuberculosis
about a third higher, and typhoid nearly double. But what
really matters most is a more generalised degeneration in
the health and strength of the whole community.

My own view may be summed up in the words of a
British M.O.H. who suddenly “let himself go” at a mess in
Hamburg one Sunday afternoon. “What on earth are you
politicians in London up to?”, he said, mistaking my
occupation. “Do you realise what’s going on here?
Ignoramuses see some people in the streets looking fairly
well nourished but don’t realise that they are living on
carbohydrates and have no resistance, and they forget
that the most seriously undernourished people are at
home. The present figure of tuberculosis is appalling,
and it may be double next year. An epidemic of any
kind would sweep everything before it. We are on the
edge of a frightful catastrophe : and if you politicians in
London” — he looked at me indignantly, and swept my
disclaimer aside — “don’t do something about it very soon
two problems that seem to have been worrying you will be
solved. The size of the German population and manure.”

54

5 6

2 . Inside
the bunker
school.

3. Children
playing
‘home” in a
corridor of
the bunker

58

* O

59

home” at an
elementary
school in
Hamburg.

. The same.

8. Man in Laiigenhoni Hospital , Hamburg.
Emaciation, not oedema. 56, looked 70. Was
clearing nibble, and got half heavy workers' ration.

Unmarried, as are manv of these cases —
they depend on eating “out.”

9. Woman recovering from oedema in Town
Hospital, Diissefdorf. Had been there three weeks.
Husband dead, lived with her brother entirely
on ration care/. Water nearly gone.

6 3

10. Emaciation (not oedema) case in Town
Hospital, Diisseldorf. Came three weeks before —
collapsed and fell: see mark on face.

1 1 . In Town Hospital, Diisseldorf. Came in two
months before; water now gone. Alone; baker.

66

Homeless

bache/or.

1 3. Foot ot a man who had come to University
Hospital, Hamburg, four weeks before with oedema.
Now all water gone except a little in foot. I made
the dent that you see.

6 7

68

undressed at
my request at
a school in
Diisseldorf.

1 5. The same.

69

1 6 . The children of the Oberhausen mother
who “broke down.”

7 °

1 7 . The same.

7 1

1 8 . Child of ten dying from TB
in the Town Hospital, Diisseldorf.

II

SHOES AND OTHER THINGS

§ (i)

“this misery of boots”

(From The Daily Herald , Nov. 30)

When I was in my early teens, a very famous Fabian
pamphlet was published called This Misery of Boots. H. G.
Wells was the author. For thirty years or more I had for-
gotten all about it : but the title rang in my head day after
day and hour after hour in Hamburg and Diisseldorf
and Oberhausen and a dozen other places. It is ringing in
my head still.

Attention has been almost exclusively concentrated on
the desperate food situation in Germany, but food is by
no means the whole story. The working class has been
wearing out its last articles of necessity, and the possi-
bilities of replacement have, for a large majority, just not
existed. The result is literally indescribable : you can only
understand what it means when you actually see it — or,
at a long remove, by photographs.

I can deal here with only two of the most urgent
necessities. The first is children’s shoes. I went into school
after school in Germany, taking classes at random and
simply asking children with kaputten — ruined — shoes to
put up their hands. Here are a few of the results : 34 out of
58, 15 out of 37, 34 out of 53. (Incidentally, 50 per cent, of
the latter had had no breakfast — and, during the bread
famine in the Rhineland, this was a common occurrence.)
I then got the children to come up to the front, and had a

73

look at their feet. Now glance, please, at the photographs
(plates 19-42) for specimens of what I saw. There’s no
fake about them — it’s my hand that you see holding the
children’s legs.

Bits of dirty rag : a thin strap over a stocking full of
holes : soles — innumerable soles — completely broken away
from the uppers — these were common form. Then there
were the children hobbling painfully in shoes borrowed
from a younger brother: and children slopping about in
their mother’s or father’s shoes : and, in one class, three
children completely barefooted. One child said he
wouldn’t be able to come to school tomorrow “because
father would want his shoes” : another — “I have Hans’
shoes so he’s got to stay at home”. The teachers estimated
that, when the really wet weather started, “shoe absentee-
ism” might amount to 50 per cent.

That is what I saw with my own eyes : but still I wasn’t
satisfied. I saw it, truly, in class after class and town after
town : but, I said to myself desperately, mightn’t this after
all be a bad sample — could it conceivably be typical of the
zone as a whole? So I thought I’d try statistics for a
change. Now the official figure of the number of children’s
shoes needed for the period from July to December, at the
very minimum and on the most “Spartan” plan possible —
not on the basis of civilised living— is 6,200,000 : and the
total number of Bezugsmarken issued for their purchase,
from May to December (actual figure to November,
estimated for December), is 1,771,000. So, at our Com-
merce Headquarters at Minden, cold figures on a half-
sheet of notepaper confirmed, and for the whole zone, the
human tragedy that I had been witnessing during the last
few weeks.

I will take only one other article of necessity. I think I
might have asked about it anyhow, for when you see these
children at “school” in an air-raid bunker without fresh
air or daylight, you suddenly think of what your own

74

children looked like 17 or 26 years ago. But there was no
necessity to ask: whomever you might be talking to,
whether it was a doctor, or a British or German welfare
worker, or one of our own people concerned with the
distribution of consumer goods, sooner or later, and nearly
always sooner, the same topic would come up — the topic of
babies’ napkins. Babies’ napkins, to all intents and purposes,
simply do not exist. 520 babies were born in Diisseldorf in
October, but not a single Bezugsmark was issued for the
purchase of a napkin. In Essen, during the same month,
700 babies were born ; 25 Bezugsmarken were issued — and
it was the first issue for five months.

There is a similar appalling shortage of everything else
that babies need. As to the clothing position generally,
here are figures about textiles as a whole. Permitted
Potsdam level of production, a trifle under 19,000 tons a
month: present capacity, 15,700 tons a month: actual
production, 4,000 tons a month. By the end of the year
stocks of raw material will be practically exhausted,
and then, unless something’s done about it, the whole
thing will come to an end. The remedy — import raw
material and stop exporting coal.

And now, I suppose, someone who imagines he’s an
Englishman in the real sense as well as by the accident of
birth will say “They’ve brought it on themselves”. The
babies too?

§(ii)

MORE FACTS ABOUT CONSUMER GOODS

In a conversation with a high British authority in
Schleswig-Holstein (October 7th) I was shown a list of
items of clothing, etc., needed as a matter of desperate
urgency for the “expellees” there, who number about
1,200,000 out of a total population of 3, 000, 000. Examples :
men’s overcoats 200,000; shoes 1,000,000; men’s drawers

75

400,000; women’s overcoats 200,000; women’s knickers
400,000; sanitary towels 150,000; blankets 500,000. My
informant added that he hoped, at best, to get 10 per cent,
of these requirements. The minimum need for beds for
these “expellees” was about 360,000, of which about
15,000 were being obtained. I visited a ship and a large
camp in which “expellees” were housed, and saw mostly
stretchers, wooden bunks, and bundles of sordid bed-
clothes on the floor : indeed, now that I come to think of
it, I don’t recollect seeing a single bed. But my memory
may be at fault.

In Hamburg (October 10th) a senior officer told me that
the “Spartan” needs of the general population in that city
were being met to the extent of no more than 10 per cent.
I should add that there was an improvement over the
zone as a whole in November, when there was an excep-
tional issue of Bezugsmarken to dispose of accumulated
stocks. But this improvement, though considerable in
absolute figures, was quite insignificant relatively to the
need.

The senior inspector of high-schools for girls in Hamburg
told me (October nth) that it was impossible to get
children’s clothes mended, as there were no mending
materials — no wool, cotton, needles, etc. Even in middle-
class homes such things as toothbrushes, combs and
sponges were lacking. Sanitary towels were quite un-
obtainable.

I was told in Hamburg (October 15th) by the German
public health officer, in the presence of the British public
health officer, who did not demur, that in this city (a) the
supply of bandages satisfied only one fifth or one sixth of
the demand, there being hardly enough to cover even
fresh wounds ; ( b ) there was sufficient insulin to meet only
one third of the requirements ; ( c ) in addition to insulin
and penicillin, plaster of Paris, iodine, bismuth, alcohol
and digitalis were all in short supply. 80,000 men, at

76

the date given, were without artificial legs, and some had
been waiting for three or four years.

During a tour of homes, bunkers, night-refuges etc. in
Hamburg I found innumerable cases of people sleeping
four in one bed (“foot to foot”) ; on the floor; on wood,
covered with a thin and dirty bit of sacking filled with
straw or sawdust ; and on stretchers. I shall give examples
later. I found incredibly filthy bedclothes, and sometimes
only a single blanket for covering, or no covering at all.

At a conference with students of Hamburg University
(October 19th) I learned that a recent census had shown
that only 50 per cent, of them had a stove.

Contraceptives are virtually unobtainable.

I was told at a conference in Diisseldorf with the German
public health officer for North Rhine-Westphalia and four
other doctors, including the director of children’s hospitals,
that expectant mothers came to lie in with nothing at all
for their babies, and that the nurses went scrounging
round for bits of cloth in which the mothers could wrap up
their babies when they left.

Gelsenkirchen is a town of 260,000 inhabitants. Here is
a list of Bezugsmarken issued for June — the total list, I
think, of all Bezugsmarken, but possibly the totals only for
the articles named : 56 cardigans, 49 frocks, 2 1 knickers,
4 babies’ napkins, 3 babies’ knickers, 3 rubber sheets,
7 kilograms of knitting wool, and 21 small bath towels.
There were 182 births during the same period.

The chief doctor of a Red Cross hospital near Cologne
urgently requested (September 21st) the following articles
for sick “expellees” who could not be admitted without
them : 25 mattresses, 80 sheets, 80 pillow-cases, 100 towels,
60 children’s night-clothes, and so on. The answer was
that “nothing could be done”.

When I was with the British welfare officer for Diissel-
dorf (October 30th) a haggard and yellow-faced woman
came in, and you could hardly hear what she said for her

77

sobbing. Her two children had no shoes : she had been
applying to the Wirtschaftsamt for Bezugsmarken since
February, and had just been told to apply again next year.
One of her children had died of undernourishment in
1943. As she was a cleaner at the Control Commission
office, and special things can be done for such people, the
welfare officer wrote her an order.

I select a few items (out of over 100 headings) in the
“Spartan bid” put in for the third quarter of 1946 by the
British welfare branch at Diisseldorf. The articles were
wanted for “expellees” in Westphalia, and you must
remember that they arrive, these victims of wickedness,
all but naked, for the most part, of possessions. 30,000
women’s overcoats, 35,000 women’s knickers, 45,000 pairs
of women’s stockings, 5,000 pairs of women’s shoes,

100.000 sanitary towels, 10,000 pairs of boys’ trousers,

18.000 boys’ vests, 30,000 girls’ dresses, 30,000 infants’ sets
(0-18 months), 70,000 blankets, 40,000 towels, 60,000
sheets, 80,000 chairs, 180,000 knives, forks and spoons,

100.000 plates, 60,000 cooking-pots, and so on. The total
number of articles in the list was 3,118,000. By October
30th not a single article had been received.

I have before me an official document issued at Diissel-
dorf for the Regional Economic Officer, Military Govern-
ment, North Rhine-Westphalia, and dated October 28th
1946. It includes a table giving (a) the estimated yearly
requirements for the region (“based on a minimum scale
which is below that at which normal peace requirements
are assessed”), and ( b ) the Bezugsmarken issued from May
to November inclusive. It must be remembered that the
latter figures include the exceptional November issue.
In the figures that follow the first is the (a) and the second
the ( b ) figure. Men’s and boys’ clothing: 33,283,000;

1.982.000. Women’s and girls’ clothing: 38,623,000;

1.425.000. Boys’ clothing (4 to 15 years): 6,727,000;

584.000. Babies’ clothing: 1,716,000; 355,000. House and

table linen: 22,166,000; 1,166,000. Babies’ bedding:
231,000; 61,000. Furniture: 3,143,000; 190,000.

I’m told that people don’t “understand” statistics.
They’re really quite simple. Those just given mean, for
instance, that only one out of every 16 girls and women
who desperately need some garment — “Spartan” implies
“desperately” — can get it.

79

82

»3

31

»5

»7

Ill

PEOPLE’S HOMES

§ (i)

LETTER WRITTEN TO MY WIFE

Friday October 25th,
Hamburg, 5.45 a.m.

I want to try to get on to paper what I saw last night.
I went with the Salvation Army people, who are doing a
wonderful work, to investigate one or two cases that had
been brought to their attention, and then to see the
cellar-dwellings generally.

In one room — I’ll describe the size presently — were
living a soldier discharged at the beginning of October,
his wife (who is expecting a baby in a fortnight) and his
seventy-two year old mother. They live, eat, cook, work,
and sleep in the one room. There is one bed : a table : two
chairs : a very small side-table : and a little cooking-stove.
The amount of space, apart from that taken up by this
furniture, is about 32 square feet — about 2X2 between the
table and the door, 5X2 between table and bed, and 6x3
between table, wall and stove.

The old mother sleeps in the bed ; on the floor, on a filthy
rug but no mattress, sleep the husband and wife — who will
have a baby in a fortnight. They sleep in the 6x3 space.
I asked the wife whether she could sleep : she smiled quite
bravely, and shrugged her shoulders. Her clothes were
wretched, and she was barefoot; I asked her why, and
she showed me her only pair of shoes — a kaputt pair which
was more or less useless. She has no baby-clothes or

89

cradle — nothing. People like this have literally nothing.
She will go to hospital for eight days and then return with
her baby to this “room”. Their chief concern is to get a
basket or something to put the baby in — I suppose in the
space I have marked 5X2, or on the table — people often
sleep on tables in this Free City of Hamburg. They were
all quite cheerful : I asked the old mother whether she had
enough to eat, and she replied with a smile “Nein, nein,
ich bin immer hungrig” — as if that were the fault of her
appetite.

This was all pretty shaking : but it was heaven — I really
mean this — in comparison with the next place, I think
because the people were cheerful. The next place I can’t
begin to describe so as to convey any sense of it — it was
like a deliberately vile Daumier cartoon. I doubt whether
there could be more hopeless misery, or a more sordid
caricature of humanity (humanity — the heights and
depths : I told you in yesterday’s letter of the Heiligen-
stadt Testament which I saw the night before last — they
had kept it back for me, guarded by two men night and
day, to do me honour). Then I try to restore my sense of
proportion by remembering that Belsen and Auschwitz
were far, almost infinitely, wickeder.

The place was a cellar under rubble in one of the huge

90

devastated areas. For light (during the day) and air there
was one tiny window. On a table was a sort of open lamp
with a naked flame — some sort of kerosene affair. There
was one bed about the size of mine at home, in which the
wife and husband were sleeping ; on a sort of couch was
the son, crippled in the war, and I should say in the
twenties; and on the floor, on an indescribably filthy
“mattress” which was all broken open with the sawdust
spilling out, was the daughter. She looked fifty, but I sus-
pect she was about twenty-five. This was an extraordinary
creature. Imagine E — A — , but taller and gaunter,
with a huge nose (or it looked huge), a bony emaciated
face, and several front teeth missing, and you get an idea
of what she looked like in the half-light of the lamp. I
imagine that she ought to have been rather handsome —
perhaps a little like Livia. She also appeared to be pretty
crippled, and her hand was shaking terribly, I suppose
from hunger. There was no free space in the cellar at all —
and again they lived, ate, and slept here. Nobody could
work — the young man couldn’t because he was crippled,
and the father because he was too weak. They lived on
the father’s tobacco card : it brought them in 1 20 marks
every six weeks to supplement their wretched dole — 40
cigarettes at three marks apiece. (German cigarettes are
much less valuable than English, which are fetching
seven marks.) The black market here keeps people
alive. The air was so thick that I could hardly keep
my glasses free enough from steam to see. The woman
cried when the Salvation Army people gave her some
money — and we all hurriedly unloaded our cigarettes, with
a sort of personal shame, on the young man. And now I
haven’t given the least idea of the nightmare sordid horror
of the whole thing : there was no cheerfulness here, and
I am quite sure I shall never forget the huge trembling
half-toothless daughter — who might have looked like
Livia.

When we left this hell of a place, we picked our way over
piles of rubble by the light of a torch ; on all three sides you
could see an occasional feeble speck of light on the ground,
which showed that some of the cellar-dwellers were
awake.

We then went a little further on, where there were
cellars under ruined buildings by the canal — horribly
damp. In one cellar — this one was marvellously clean —
were sleeping seven people — a mother, father, twins of
twenty, twins of eight, and one other child. (Plate 130.)
The mother, who sat up in bed to talk to us, was wonder-
fully brave, God bless her. The son of twenty had just come
in — he was some sort of metal worker — they showed us
one of the irons (for ironing clothes) he makes. His
dinner was on the table — a medium-sized plate of mixed
cabbage and mashed potatoes. I asked him when he had
had his last meal — it was now half-past ten. He had
had it at twelve — the same dish of cabbage and potatoes ;
for breakfast six slices of bread with smear. I foolishly
asked whether he had had any butter; he laughed in
amazement — but not at all bitterly. The Salvation Army
people gave the woman a large bar of chocolate, and
just as we were leaving we heard one of the children
asking for it. It is quite impossible to give you any idea of
what it means to these people to be given a little extra
food like that.

My dear, all this is not exceptional. In Hamburg, I
am told (I haven’t checked this yet), there are 77,000
people living in bunkers, cellars, etc. ; and the Salvation
Army adjutant, who has been working here for a year and
a half, estimates that 25% of them are living under
“Daumier” conditions. The official statistics show that
the general housing position in Hamburg is frightful.

The Salvation Army people stopped as we were driv-
ing back to show me one of the tiny “graves” with which
the place is dotted — a little cross with “here rests our

9 2

mother . . and a withered wreath by the side of the
“road” (Plate 57) . The mother had been buried under the
debris, and of course the body is still there — there must be
hundreds of thousands of bodies under the rubble. The
three nights of our mass raids must have been worse than
hell (and I remind myself again that Belsen and Ausch-
witz were far worse). Blazing people threw themselves
into the Canal. There is a mass grave near here where,
the Salvation Army people told me, 20,000 people are
buried.

Oh my dear, get copies of this made and send them to
John Strachey and Attlee. They are both decent and kind-
hearted men ; and if only they could see what I have seen
they would let us send parcels of food to these poor and
dear people — I call them dear, because their suffering,
and often their bravery, make one love them: or is it
that loving them is the only way to save one’s own
self-respect as a human being? How can they let bread-
rationing in England be an excuse, when we know that so
many changed their B.U.s into points? And these parcels
are not a little thing : each individual case is each indivi-
dual case : and I have seen with my own eyes the gratitude
with which even a single bar of chocolate is received. It
is a terrible sin to withhold the power to give this solace.
If John could fly here and see for a single night what I
have seen, he would make whoever it is in the Cabinet
that is obstructing give way.

You know I went to Belsen on Tuesday, and I wrote to
you what I felt ; I don’t for a single second forget the other
side of the picture. But these are people in an agony of
suffering — and some of our authorities at home are be-
having less well than the “other ranks” of the B.A.O.R.
who take buns from the canteen and give them to the
children.

93

of the girl
with a
headache
at /iilich

a wm

< ]

45 . The same.
The window.

96

46 . The same.
The bedroom.

97

9 8

48 . The same.

Lavatory.

99

49 . The same.

lOO

50 . The same.
The shoe.

lOl

51 . Julieli. The wan with the carbuncles.

102

54 . Hotel
Restaurant
Kaiserhof.
Jiilich.

10 5

55 . High Street, Duren.

56 . Diiren.

106

ft 'Vnsen’w irenat
K 'ttUkirtkHer

^(enttpscfiatu

intuit slitTen (jedenkett

57 . This is a grave at Diiren, similar to the Hamburg
ones described in the text.

10 7

§(ii)

LITTLE JULICH

On your way from Diisseldorf to Aachen you come upon
what is perhaps the most ruined town in Germany.
Jiilich is 93 per cent, destroyed ; our bombers came over
one night, and after twenty minutes it was no longer there.
I think of it as “little Jiilich”, and with a curious mixture
of sadness and affection.

I was the first Englishman to visit it for four months,
and my arrival on a Sunday morning caused quite a flutter
of excitement. I found my way with difficulty to the
modest town hall, for many of the streets, of course, no
longer exist. A small delegation, which included the
Stadtdirektor, received me charmingly, and wanted to
give me particulars of “Jiilich then and now” ; but I had
an early appointment at Aachen, and was impatient to be
gone. I stayed, when it came to it, for two or three hours.

We began to walk among the rubble, and I asked how
many people had lived there before the war. “Eleven
thousand,” said the Stadtdirektor, who talked very fair
English with an attractive hesitation. “And now?” I
thought the answer would be a few hundred, but I was out
by seven thousand or so. I wondered, but didn’t ask,
where they might be living.

A minute later we came upon a sort of stove-pipe stick-
ing out of the ground. The Stadtdirektor knew the place,
but it took us a little time to find the entrance to what was
clearly some kind of underground dwelling. After one or
two false starts we went, with my torch shining, down a
narrow incline tunnelled in the earth; and suddenly, by
some trick of childhood recollection, I thought of the
“gaps” at Margate.

The cellar consisted of two tiny rooms housing seven
people. Six of them were in what I suppose must be called
the sitting-room, which was about the height of a man ;

108

they could just cram into it — the parents, two adult
sons, and two younger children (the seventh was out).
One of the children was sitting with her aching head bent
down over the table, and she didn’t look up even when I
had a photograph taken. I have wanted many things in
my life, some good and some bad : but what I wanted just
for that second more passionately than I ever wanted
anything before — I’ve no doubt I’m exaggerating, but
that’s how it seemed — was a bottle of aspirin. Back now in
London, and going to the Ivy for lunch and so on, I
suddenly catch myself thinking at odd moments that
while I am here they are there — all of them still there in
that cellar, and the girl perhaps with a headache that will
never go away.

In the adjoining hole you could just make out a dim
hell of wooden beds and dirty bedclothes. They had
neither water nor lavatory : for excreting they used either
a pail or, more commonly, the rubble outside. The clothes
they “stood up in” seemed their only possessions. (Plates
43-46.)

Up and across what had once been a road a bit of a
small house was standing — a ground-floor room and two
rooms above it, with the staircase (now an outside stair-
case) intact, but the rest of the house a mess of bricks open
to the sky. A mother and daughter lived and slept in the
tiny ground-floor room, and I can’t get them out of my
mind either. The girl was a bad case of open TB, with
brooding eyes and a half-open mouth : the mother looked
so desolate and grey with sorrow that I oughtn’t to have
been horrified, as I was, when she told us she wanted to
die. She was a widow, and the two of them lived on some-
thing microscopic. The woman was barefoot, for she
possessed only a single ruined shoe. I asked her to come into
the doorway to be photographed with the shoe in her
hand, but she wouldn’t come far forward into the good
light, saying that she didn’t want to make a show of her-

iog

self. God knows that whenever I took a photograph I
made the interpreter explain that I was doing it only to
help, for people who wouldn’t believe my descriptions
might believe photographs; but even so I always felt
horribly ashamed. (Plates 47-50.)

Underground nearby lived a man of 69, alone. His
wife was dead, and he had heard nothing of his sons for
two years : they might be prisoners, he thought, in Russia.
There was no artificial light in his cell, and for natural
light only a hole a foot or so across and covered with
paper. The ceiling was wet. As I flashed my torch about I
noticed the filthy bandage on the man’s neck, and saw
that his hands were swollen and covered with those
corrupt-looking spots — something midway between im-
petigo and small carbuncles — which I had already seen
so frequently during the last few days, especially among
the children. They appear to have cleared up, it seems,
and then new ones break out on the half-healed scars.
(Plate 51.)

All this was the dreadful side of Jtilich: and it wasn’t
exceptional, as you’ll appreciate when you remember that
seven thousand people are living there, and hardly a
house even partially standing. But there was a happy side
too. I had been getting friendly with my Stadtdirektor,
who turned out to be a Social Democrat, and to have
been “on the run” continuously from 1933 right up to what
he still called, in spite of everything, the liberation. He
was a gentle little man, and when he found me sympathetic
asked if he might come in my car as far as Diiren (on the
way to Aachen) so as to be able to talk a little longer. As
we were leaving the rubble for the green fields, I noticed
a longish bungalow of wood that seemed somehow to
gleam and glisten in that awful desolation : and over the
door the words, in bold lettering, “Hotel-Restaurant
Kaiserhof”. I looked at my comrade with a gesture of
enquiry, and he replied with a smile, half proud and half

1 10

deprecating, Es beginnt (“Something’s beginning”). I got
out to have a look. Two or three men were drinking a glass
of beer in the vestibule-restaurant, and we sat and talked
with them for a moment or so. Then we went down the
corridor. The rooms that opened out of it on both sides
were small, overcrowded, and furnished with the mini-
mum of necessities ; but they were bright and clean, and
the people seemed contented. In one room there was a
mother with the three most beautiful children I have ever
seen. (Plate 54.)

On the road to Diiren my comrade, who had been feel-
ing his way, began to talk more freely. “Couldn’t the
British comrades” he said “come to see us occasionally?
There are a lot of socialists here, and we feel terribly cut
off. I don’t mean official visits from Morgan Phillips [I
was surprised that he knew the name] ; I mean the little
socialists.” A few minutes later, for by this time I had told
him I was a publisher, he begged me to send him some
English books. “And up-to-date newspapers,” he added.

At present I only get an Observer four months old. I
want to tell my people about what’s happening in Eng-
land, but it’s difficult to do it when my news is so out of
date.” He always called the inhabitants of Julich “my
people” as if he were a sort of priest ; and indeed in one
sense he was.

Shortly afterwards we arrived at Diiren and he left me.

I don’t suppose I shall ever see Julich again. But I want to ;
and I wonder whether I have at all made clear why I think
of it as little Julich”, and with a curious mixture of sad-
ness and affection.

§ (iii)

MORE ABOUT PEOPLE’S HOMES

I have reproduced above a letter to my wife exactly as it
was written, in an attempt to convey the impression made
on me at the time. A few more descriptions may be useful.

1 1 1

On October nth, in Hamburg, I visited a number of
those “emergency” buildings of one kind or another which,
eighteen months after victory, still house tens of thousands
of human beings. The first was a great building of concrete,
hellishly grim, and divided into a number of big, high and
almost utterly bare rooms. Six people lived in the first of
the rooms we went into — parents, a girl of 22, and sons of
7, 1 0 and 1 4. There was, of course, no sort of privacy —
they hadn’t even been able to fix up screens or curtains.
You’re shocked by that sort of thing at first, and then,
when you come up against it time after time, you no longer
notice it. The plank beds had, for mattresses, dirty sacks
which were either empty or filled with wood shavings.
There had been, until recently, only one blanket for each
person, but now there were two or three. These people
had been living here since January, and I was told by the
housing authorities that there was no chance of their being
able to move out for at least another year. The father was
in — he had heart disease, and was unable to move about.
For furniture there was a tiny stove, a table and six stools
- — nothing, not even a single upright chair, to rest their
backs against. The walls were loathsome. (Plates 58, 59.)

But there are degrees of misery ; and a little crockery and
so forth on a wooden shelf somehow connected the place
with human beings. There was nothing of the kind in the
next room. Seven people lived in this — the parents and
five children, aged between 4 and 12. They had lost their
rooms in 1 943, gone to Brandenburg, returned in Decem-
ber ’45, and had been here since February. There were
no shavings in the sacks that covered their sleeping-planks,
and the rest of the furniture consisted of three stools and
one small table. Only two of them were at home — the
mother and a child of 9, neither of whom had shoes or
stockings. Remember, please, that the floor was of rough
concrete. The mother was an older version of the half-
paralysed girl I described in the letter to my wife : she was

112

crippled by rheumatism, and had what I put down in my
notes as a “swivel eye”, which oozed horribly. They were
eating better than some I came across: they had had
potatoes and tea for breakfast and three slices of bread
each with a little butter at eleven, and the remaining meal
was to consist of swedes and potatoes. I find most of my
photographs inadequate, because the photographer was
such a brilliant artist that he just couldn’t help getting an
effect of beauty even out of what was disgusting and vile ;
but plate 60 does give some idea of this particular corner
of hell.

We went on to a bunker. Bunkers are air-raid shelters
divided into rooms or cells ; a few are underground, but
most of them tower up before you, great concrete masses
spotted with diminutive vents that look like the eyes of the
blind. The Gertigstrasse bunker was of this type. The heat
and stench or not so much stench as a kind of solid and
continuous wall of congealed bad breath — were appalling.
The rooms contained nothing but tiers and tiers of wooden
bunks, with sometimes a bench and table; here the in-
mates not only slept but lived, when they were in. There
was a small kitchen for the whole bunker. One room
housed 8 men— until very recently it had housed 16; and
in another of the same size, for women, 15 had been living
a fortnight before. In a tiny cell, hardly bigger than its
occupant, a man lived quite alone. (Plates 61-63.)

A longish drive took us to the Stadtpark, which used, I
was told, to be a series of beautiful lawns. Now Nissen huts
seem to crowd every inch of it. Eating in one of them was
a miscellany of men shanghaied in other provinces — quite
legally, of course — for work on the Hamburg Project ; in
another a medley of men, women, children and babies,
prisoners of war from a camp in Norway under our con-
trol, were awaiting orders to move on. They were going to
the Russian zone, and had been here six weeks. (Plate
64.)

“3

The last place on our list that day was the Langenhorner
Chaussee. The wooden huts there were occupied by home-
less Hamburgers. In one room there were 18 of them, in-
cluding io children and belonging to 6 different families.
These people, all jumbled up together, were making the
best of it ; I noticed a bunch of flowers in a glass on the
table, and four plants in pots on what looked like a radio-
gram in the corner. (Plates 65 and 66.)

These were some of the “emergency” buildings — the
“emergency” being a matter of months or years. Seven
days later I went to have a look at ordinary housing con-
ditions in Hamburg. In the first room we went to — one
room for everything — there was a mother with 4 children,
whose ages ran from 4 to 9. The husband was a prisoner in
Russia, and the wife got a dole which came out at about 100
marks a month after the rent was paid. What she wanted
above all was shoes for the children. She was a lovely
creature — spiritually, I mean, for I can’t remember what
she looked like physically, except that she smiled the whole
time. “I’m doing my best for the children” she said “so
that when my husband comes home he’ll have nothing to
reproach me with.” God, how I hated at that moment the
cruelty and treason of men, who, with the war over, can so
offend by holding their prisoners for a year, for two years,
for three years, and perhaps forever.

In the Kleine Marienstrasse, opposite a waste of desola-
tion, a man had got hold of some bricks and made a dwell-
ing-place with them out of a ruin. He had a wife, 7 child-
ren and a dog. The first of the two rooms measured 105
square feet ; the leaky ceiling was made of cardboard and
corrugated paper over bits of timber. This was the living
room. The mother and father slept here in a narrow bed,
which for once in a way had a mattress of sorts, filthy and
ruined though it was. The other room measured 85 square
feet. Three children slept in each of the two beds, “foot

“4

to foot” ; there was also a pram. Each bed had an eider-
down and a sordid, wet, coverless pillow. The zinc roof
was soaking. They had neither water nor lavatory, but
used the rubble opposite.

The elections had just been held, and I asked the man
how he had voted. “S.P.D. (Socialist).” “Why?” “Be-
cause I wanted a change — no more Nazis.” He had
deserted during the war, but the Gestapo had “come
after” his wife and he had returned to save her and been
imprisoned for 6 months. He was a shoemaker by trade,
and his spirit was marvellous. (Plates 67-75.)

Over in the Lammstrasse we found a flat with two rooms
plus a diminutive communal kitchen. In the first room,
which measured no square feet, a family of four did
everything except cook. There was a bed for the widow
and daughter of 18, a sofa for the son of 20, who was a rail-
way worker, and the floor (without mattress) for the other
daughter of 31. Their most treasured possession was a
bicycle, which they kept in the room. “We manage” the
woman said in reply to some question ; “I have three very
good children.” On the table and ledges were pots of
flowers, for it was the elder daughter’s Geburtstag. (Plate
76.)

The other room was loathsome. The photograph gives
some idea of it. The only free space was a narrow lane
measuring three feet by ten, with on one side a jumble of
sacks, bundles, winter potatoes and if I remember rightly
coal — or perhaps the coal was outside the kitchen — and on
the other side three beds with filthy bedclothes. Living in
this room— I must repeat living, not merely sleeping in it —
were a father and mother and five children. The father
and a 13-year-old boy slept in the first bed; the mother
with a 7-year-old boy and a 9-year-old daughter — at the
foot — in the second; and two boys of 11 and 13 in the
third. What the seven of them did with themselves when
they were not in bed I can’t imagine, for there was hardly

"5

room to stand, and nowhere at all to sit, either here or in
the kitchen which they shared with the other family of
four. And yet the father, a railwayman on night-shift who
got out of bed to talk to me, was cheerful enough. The
need of which he seemed most conscious was for cigarettes,
as his ration ran to only one a day, and he couldn’t afford
to buy on the black market. When I gave him a few he
was courteously grateful, and showed none of that obse-
quiousness which you read so much about but which I
hardly ever came across, except in people who depended
directly on the British for their jobs. All the railwaymen,
he told me, were keenly interested in politics and had
voted socialist almost without exception; he personally
knew only one communist. The reason, he thought, was
that they were always seeing prisoners of war returning
from Russia in terrible shape — men looking as if they were
40 but turning out to be 2 1 . This railwayman was one of
the very few working-class people I met in Germany who
were still, in the positive sense, pro-British. (Plates 77-
79 -)

In a cellar nearby, stiflingly hot, there were, exception-
ally, four beds for four people — mother, father, and two
children. But there was no room for anything else.
(Plates 80 and 81.)

The next place we visited was a flat with two rooms and
a kitchen, housing in all nine persons. In the first room,
stuffy and squalid, two unrelated bachelors dossed down.
The windows were smashed and boarded up with wood,
and there was no natural light. Crammed together next
door, with two beds between them, were a father and
mother, two married daughters, and a child. But worst of
all was the kitchen. Here, where everyone cooked, lived a
married couple. The floor was rotten, and the room so
small that when my conducting officer, the photographer
and I had got in we almost literally could hardly turn
round. The man was a communist, and had come out of a

concentration camp— Fuhlsbuttel was the name of it, if I
got it down right— in 1935. He had been unfit for work
ever since, for they had put him for 72 hours in a cellar
with a temperature of 5 degrees below zero, and had broken
the base of his spine when they beat him. The only decora-
tion in the room was a sort of poster he had made, with
two red stars, crossed red flags, the words “rot- front”
and “Unsterbliche opfer”, and drawings of Thael-
mann, Schulze and Andree. “My comrades” he said,
pointing to it. I have said many bitter things about com-
munists and shall say many more, for indeed I think that
their philosophy, if it has its way, will ruin Europe ; but I
was able, thank God, to forget all about that and to call
him Genosse . I was grateful when he accepted my hand.

The other family called me away to show me the com-
munal lavatory. I tried to excuse myself, but they insisted.
It was at the bottom of a pitch-black staircase, or rather of
half a one; for the stairs suddenly ended, and you had to
jump on to a heap of bricks, and then walk a hundred
yards or so on to the closet. When you had done, you had
to jump back on to the stairs. The communist with the
damaged spine, they told me, took an hour and a quarter
every time he went. My photographer managed to get
some sort of impression by the aid of my torch. (Plates
82-86.)

In the Repsoldstrasse we saw a bed- and living-room,
almost the whole of it occupied by four beds, in which
slept three girls of 10, 14 and 21, and two mothers, each
with a baby. (Plates 87 and 88.) It was in this neigh-
bourhood, I think, that a crowd gathered when people
saw what I was up to, and a half-crazy woman seized my
arm and dragged me off to show me something which my
interpreter translated as “the mushrooms”. They turned
out to be some sort of fungus growing on the wet wall of
her bedroom. Ein Schweinerei” the woman kept scream-
ing.

11-

But the afternoon ended pleasantly. At Eppendorf, a
suburb of Hamburg, a cheerful old labourer had built
himself a little house— illegally, I gather — and added a
small market garden. There were a few rabbits in a hutch,
and some babies that seemed happy.

The same evening, after dining with the Burgomaster
and Senate at the Rathaus— the modest dinner was ex-
cellently cooked, and they gave me one of the rare bottles
of magnificent hock which the concierge had managed to
hide from the Nazis — I went round the night refuges.
These were places where you might spend only a single
night. In the first of them were men who were wandering
about from various parts of Germany ; several of those I
spoke to had been press-ganged for the Hamburg Project,
and had got away from their barracks because they were
dissatisfied with the conditions. I had seen one of them
in the Stadtpark a few days before.

The second place was the Jahnturnhalle, where mothers
and children were spending the night. They were units in
that homeless crowd that goes milling about Germany “to
find relatives”, they said, but really, or mainly, I was told,
because a restlessness has come over them that just won’t
let them settle down. (Plate 89.) In another room I
talked to a boy from Pomerania with crippled feet. 3,000
young people, he said, had been sent to Cracow, and only
126 had returned. The rest were supposed to have ended
up in Siberia, and so the young people were fleeing to the
British zone. He had fled himself with 26 others, but only
three had managed to get through. This story may, of
course, have been “propaganda”, but my conducting
officer told me that week after week for months he had
been hearing exactly the same. The Red Cross people,
here or at one of the other refuges, told me that the place
was much used by prisoners of war returning from the
East. Many of them suffered from hunger oedema. They

118

were given one piece of black bread as an emergency
ration.

We finished at about two o’clock in the morning at a
place called “The Asylum”. (Plate 90.) A boy was
leaving his bunk for the lavatory, and I got him to tell me
his story. He was Georg Bohlmann, aged 16, of Wildstein
near Eger, and a Sudeten German. He had been dancing
with his friends one Sunday afternoon in the village when
a car arrived full of Czech soldiers wearing armbands
lettered, if I got it down right, S.N.B. They took away 43
boys — all Sudeten Germans — aged from 16 to 19. No
reason was given.

The boys were taken to a mining camp near Briix,
where Bohlmann worked for 9 months, 8 or 9 hours a
day and 7 days a week. They had a cup of coffee and
one slice of bread for breakfast, 4 potatoes and sauerkraut
at mid-day, and 2 slices of bread and a cup of coffee
at 6. They were paid 20 Kronen a week, the price of
a cigarette being 5 Kronen. They were not allowed to
write home, and their parents had no knowledge of their
whereabouts.

One day when the new ration of sauerkraut was being
brought into the camp, Bohlmann seized the opportunity
to escape with three others. (Of the 150 boys in the camp
some tried to escape every week, but if they were caught
they were beaten.) On September 1st he crossed the fron-
tier near Bayreuth and made his way to Frankfurt-on-
Main, mostly on foot, but sometimes by train — the latter
“black”, which meant, I gather, travelling on the luggage
rack. From there he got to Hanover by canal boat, went
to the Youth Labour Office for a job as an electrician, but
failed as he was only an apprentice. So he came to Ham-
burg by lorry (I kept saying inside myself, with guilty
insistence, “No, you never refused anyone a lift — or did
you?”) and was spending a night at the Asylum before
trying again. He added that in Eger older men were

“9

similarly seized in the streets and taken off to labour
camps. (Plate 91.)

I left Hamburg for Diisseldorf on October 26th, and
spent some of the following day — a Sunday — with the Red
Cross detachment. I don t know how to describe these
people and what they are doing; I can only say that I
remember them with gratitude and happiness. They took
me round some cellars. We went down two long flights of
stairs to an awful couple of rooms below. There was, of
course, no natural light, and no ventilation of any kind.
The place, which had recently been flooded for 4 weeks,
was inhabited by two women and five children, belonging
to two different families. Every inch of room was crammed
with furniture and beds in double tiers. The lavatory was
a pail. I ventured into a wet, disused room with a curtain
over the entrance ; the stench was so frightful that I had to
suck lozenges all the way back. One of the women was
pregnant. A child, whose face was covered with sores,
played with my torch and called me “uncle” ; he wouldn’t
let me go. We visited cellar after cellar of this type; some
of them were wonderfully clean, and on occasion decorated
with home-made silhouette pictures, photographs and the
like. Crucifixes were frequent. The worst place, I think,
was a cellar of two rooms divided by a long wet passage,
without light of any kind. A mother lived in one room, her
daughter with several children in the other. They were
cheerful. Down below, somewhere else, was an injured
woman who couldn’t move from her bed except with the
aid of two sticks ; she smiled at first, but presently began to
sob, and kept repeating “Alles verloren”. Many of these
people had been bombed out two, three, or four times.
All of them were grateful, terribly grateful, when they
were given something.

The Red Cross people also took me to a bunker, of
which there are several in Diisseldorf. This one was said to

120

be the best, for there was a little passage between the
double row of cells on each floor, and people could sit in it.
The typical cell measured 2§ lengths of my walking-stick
by 4J, and many contained five persons ; that works out
at about two square metres a person, or about fth of the
Army minimum. There was of course no natural light,
little or no ventilation, and the usual stench. I noticed one
tiny box of a cell in which a one-legged man was living
alone; he had neither electric light nor cover for his bed.
All the children looked white, and many seemed con-
sumptive. An old man in the passage was carefully gather-
ing some home-grown tobacco into a little tin, and a
woman was making a children’s lamp for the forthcoming
feast of St. Martin. The Control Commission housing
officer for the area had made a little playground in front of
the bunker for the children.

I made a more extensive tour of Diisseldorf dwelling-
places towards the end of the week. Down a long dark
staircase and then along a black tunnel was a man of 79,
alone in a hole which he had made habitable — according
to the ruling standards — -“all by himself”. His wife was
out on the search for bread. In another part of the same
cellar was a mother with three children — 6, 10 and 14.
All four of them slept in the only bed, two side by side in
the ordinary way, and the other two side by side at the
foot of it. The mother came back while we were there : it
was 10.30, she had been queuing for bread since early
morning, and had returned empty-handed — “bread no-
where”. One of the children was still in bed ; none had yet
had anything to eat, as the last bread had gone yesterday.
The father was a prisoner of war in Russia. Two of the
children had TB. There was a tiny stove, but no coal or
gas, only a little wood which they “fetched”. For excre-
tion they used a pail, which they emptied every morning
into a hole they dug in the courtyard above. They had
twice been bombed out. On one wall was a small faded

121

photograph of the mother and father at their wedding,
and on another some prince or king with the legend
“Lerne leiden ohne zu klagen” — “Learn to suffer without
complaining”. (Plates 92 and 93.)

I thought I would leave the cellars, and have a look at
what you might call more tolerable overcrowding. There
was a room with a good cupboard and a few decent bits of
furniture, and it would have been quite pleasant if you
could have moved about in it. Nine people lived, slept and
did their cooking there — a man and wife with five children
of their own, the child of the man’s sister, and his mother-
in-law. They were all in except one of the children. The
husband had been shot through the leg, had a stiff knee,
and was unfit for work. He got 126 marks a month by way
of relief and the mother-in-law got 22 marks; but as they
had to pay 26 marks a month for rent, their money
worked out at between 3 and 4 marks a week a head. They
had bartered almost everything on the black market and
now couldn’t even take up the food on their ration cards,
as two large cabbages, one of the women explained to me,
cost three marks. None of them had had anything to eat
that morning, but they were going to have five lbs. of
potatoes and two or three onions between them for lunch.
There was, as usual, no bread. The father had started on a
job of home cobbling, and had been promised some vege-
tables in payment. They all dressed up before being photo-
graphed, and the mother, who was of a ghastly pallor, was
particularly careful about her hair. All the children looked
pasty. (Plate 94.)

On November 2nd I went to the mining town of Ober-
hausen. Housing conditions here varied a good deal; in
some cases they were fair, in many others — I went into
shacks and flats at random — quite frightful. They had al-
ways been pretty bad, I gathered, but had got worse owing
to lack of repairs — you saw great gaping cracks, paper peel-

122

ing from the walls, and the woodwork gone from the
windows. Malnutrition and the shortage of household
goods did the rest.

There were many overcrowded shacks, with for instance
9 people sharing 3 beds in 2 small rooms. (Plates 95 and 96.)
The worst shack I saw was inhabited by a miner, his wife,
and five children aged from 3 to 14. They had twice been
bombed out, and now lived in three incredibly small
rooms. It was half-past ten and a very cold morning, but
one of the children was up in her nightdress, for the mother
had been out shopping since daybreak. The young boy
was going to be a miner ; his shoes were broken open, and
his jacket couldn’t be mended as yarn was unobtainable.
The mother’s shoes were bad too, and only one of the other
children had shoes at all, so they couldn’t go to school. I
can’t remember whether all or only some of them had
impetigo or scabies or whatever it is. The man had a car-
buncle on his neck and the remains of many on his legs ;
this, I gather, is an occupational disorder, but is much
aggravated by existing conditions. Each child had had a
couple of slices of dry bread for breakfast ; the midday meal
for the whole nine of them was to consist of a few turnips
and about five lbs. of potatoes, and then supper of potatoes
and another couple of slices of dry bread apiece. “I won-
der what Hynd would say about this?” said a well-known
man who was with me. (Plates 97-103.)

Wherever you went in Oberhausen you saw spots and
sores. A child’s legs were covered with scars, some of them
breaking open again (Plate 104); a miner had cut his
knee, and the place wouldn’t heal. When talking to him
we discovered a horrible paradox. He had been ill for a
month, and after the first ten days had lost his right to
miners’ ration and was now living as a “normal con-
sumer”. This was the ordinary practice. You would have
said that to dock a man’s food when he’s ill is idiotic as
well as iniquitous, and not at all the way to increase the

123

output of coal. He had eaten two pieces of dry bread for
breakfast and three potatoes and a few small mangel-
wurzels for lunch. It was here I discovered that the so
many grammes of skim milk were as mythical as the so
many grammes of bread and so many grammes of cereals,
for the family was getting only a quarter of its ration.

On the outskirts of this town there is a camp, in the main
for people expelled from Polish-occupied Germany. Most
of the inmates had been there for four months, and in a
bunker for a similar period previously. It was a bitter,
stormy day, and two or three dozen children were wander-
ing about aimlessly in the soaking corridor. Some had
ruined shoes and some had no shoes or stockings at all.
(Plate 105.)

The living and sleeping quarters were small, bare con-
crete cells — or they looked and felt like concrete to me, but
from my photographs you would judge them to be of white-
washed brick. In one of them a mother and daughter were
at their midday meal. The daughter looked 25, but turned
out to be 16. The mother was in bed, very ill with what
the girl thought was asthma or heart trouble or both : she
could only speak in a whisper, but I gathered that what
she complained about most was lack of air. I notice a
window in the photograph, but I did not notice it at the
time, for the place seemed stiflir.gly hot : perhaps it would
have been too cold if they had opened the window, or
perhaps they couldn’t open it. The mother’s weight had
formerly been 70 kilos, but was now only 46, and in spite
of her condition she got no extra food. They had each had
two slices of dry bread for breakfast, and you can see in the
photograph just how big was the plate of oats-and-water
soup which was their whole lunch. These were not
“expellees”, but people bombed out from Oberhausen,
evacuated to Bavaria, and now compelled to return. The
mother, I think, will soon be dead. (Plate 106.)

12 4

In Aachen, which I visited later with the Friends Relief
Service, the 22 bunkers are said to be among the worst in
Germany, and the underground one I went over was cer-
tainly horrible, with its uniform series of unventilated cells
measuring each about 70 square feet. In one of these lived
a mother of 45, a son of 20, a son of 1 1 and a daughter of 9.
There were only two narrow beds — there wouldn’t have
been room for more — and two slept in each of them, foot
to foot. The son worked in the mines, and “was becoming
weaker and weaker because he could get no rest”. In
another cell, with the usual two beds, a small stove and
21 square feet of free space, lived a man of 66 and his
daughter of 39. “In former days anything so indecent
would have been impossible” he muttered to me. (Plate
107.) But I have pleasant memories of this bunker, too.
In a third cell was an old couple expelled from Silesia.
They had lost everything, and even their clothes were bor-
rowed ; but it was Sunday, and by some exercise of care, or
some trick of arrangement, the lady looked as she sat there
exactly as my grandmother used to look when I went to tea
with her on a Sabbath afternoon. They were beautiful,
both of them — cheerful and dignified. A fourth cell, with
the two beds again, was inhabited by a mother, a son of 16
(in the mines), a son of 12 and a daughter of 9. The hus-
band was missing, and a third son was a prisoner of war.
The boy of 12 was reading with extreme absorption La
Dame aux Camelias, which he had picked up on a scrap-
heap, coverless and torn in two. He told me he loved read-
ing, and I said I would send him some books. He at once
jumped to his feet and held out his hand with the most
charming of smiles. I felt as if he had given me his blessing.

To get the whole thing into perspective, how many of the
say 23 million Germans in our zone are living in the sort
of conditions I have tried, and I am sure quite failed,
to describe? Certainly several millions, including many

125

teachers, artists, students and professional men of one kind
or another. On the other hand, a tiny and comparatively
quite insignificant minority are still in possession of ex-
tremely comfortable establishments, inhabited by perhaps
twice as many people as before but still with an amount of
space unconscionable in existing conditions. The situation
of the rest varies from very bad overcrowding in reason-
ably decent rooms, to something just adequate, or a trifle
more or less than adequate, for modest human needs.
This last category is a very small one.

126

58. In an
"emergency”
building in
Hamburg.

12 7

128

59 . The same.
One of the
beds.

60 . Another
room in
the same.

129

E-i

n: s

i: c

63. The s.i me.

64 . Nisseu
hut for
prisoners
of war

-d ■£ 5 U - -5 L ^
§ -5 J2 '5 §

''^Wa: = ?

m

belonging to
six different
families.

66. The same.

!35

i 3 6

138

69 . The same.
Bed in sitting
room and dog.

70 . The same.
Mattress

do t
O "C
-C

t-~ «

K

140

72 The same.
Wet pillow.

M4

75. The same.
Another view .

76. “Geburts
tag” room in
Lammstrasse,
Hamburg.

146

0

148

80. Cellar
room with
four beds
(exceptionally)
for four

81 . The same. Entrance.

1 5 0

82 . The flat
where the
communist
lived. The
bachelors'

1 5 2

84 . The same.
The kitchen,
with the
communist.

x 53

85 . The same.

*54

86. The same.
Down to the
lavatory.

87 . The room
in the
Repsoldstrasse,
Hamburg.

*55

158

3mquwj-[
'imi/isy
3 ' II 06

9). Georg Bohlmann.

1 59

i6o

92. Diisseldort.
The mother
who
came back
empty-handed.

93 . The same
room.

2 £

O'

in one room
(one out).

95 . Miners'
shacks at
Oberhausen.

l6 3

98 . The same, living room. This photograph
gives you a good idea of the size.

166

167

168

o

o

101 . The same — some of the inmates.

169

103. The same — the miner’s son.

170

1?2

105 . Children
in the camp
at Oberha useii.

1 06 . Ober-
hausen. The
lady with
asthma or
heart trouble.

1 73

107 . In an Aachen bunker. “In former days
anything so indecent would have been impossible.”

*74

IV

THE PLANNING OF RUIN

§ (i)

DORTMUND AND COLOGNE
( From the Daily Herald, Nov. 23)

I have been living for six weeks in a madhouse. I don’t
mean this metaphorically ; I mean it literally. The world,
unfortunately, has grown so used to being mad that it no
longer notices its own condition. But as I drove through
ruined Cologne at late dusk, with terror of the world and
of men and of myself in my heart, for a moment I just
couldn’t believe that we were deliberately, eighteen
months after the end of the war, adding further ruin to
this unspeakable desolation. But that, and nothing else, is
just what we are doing.

When Ernie Bevin made his anti-Potsdam speech in the
House of Commons, it might reasonably have been thought
that, pending developments, we would go slow on the
reparations procedure. In my childishness I thought so
myself. But not a bit of it : indeed, quite the reverse. Up
till then, only four factories had been or were in process of
being dismantled in North Rhine-Westphalia. Then at
a Press conference on October 30th Mr. Asbury, the
Regional Commissioner, thought fit to announce that
“orders were awaited for dismantling” ten other factories,
which he proceeded to name. He spoke, I understand,
without the knowledge of Berlin ; but there is nothing
extraordinary about that, for in Germany nobody ever
knows what anybody else is doing. Next day the German

*75

press added the names of two further firms. One at least
of these had been officially notified by the responsible
German body that it would be closed down very shortly :
and the information “leaked”.

Bear with me if I go into a little detail about two of these
firms. The first is Hoesch of Dortmund. Now the life of
Dortmund centres round three great concerns: and the
more important part of one of them had already been
closed down two or three weeks previously “on account of
shortage of coal”. The rumour spread that shortage of
coal was all my eye and that the real reason was repara-
tions. Mr. Asbury thereupon paid a special visit to the
factory and assured the works committee that “the present
decision to close the works was entirely due to shortage of
coal. ... No decision had as yet been made on the dis-
mantling of the works for reparations.” He spoke, I am
sure, in good faith. But three weeks later came the press
conference of October 30th. Asked at this whether it
might be assumed that the factory would in due course re-
open, a senior Dusseldorf official, in Mr. Asbury’s presence,
replied that it would be very unwise to draw any such
conclusion. The fact is, as everyone now knows, that this
particular factory was chosen for closure, when the coal
shortage broke, precisely because it was to be eliminated
under the “concentration of industry” plan — which is in-
extricably mixed up with reparations.

If Hoesch now goes the way of Dortmund Union (and
the plan, when I was in Dusseldorf, was to close it down, or
begin to close it down, in January) Dortmund— let us be
quite clear about it— is ruined. The finances of the city,
which depend very largely on this greatest of its firms, will
go to pot. The supply of fertiliser, so desperately needed to
increase German food production, will at best be inter-
rupted ; for a subsidiary of Hoesch, conveniently placed
for using the slag, is one of the biggest manufacturers of
fertiliser in the British zone, and now it will have to get

176

such slag as it can elsewhere. The local cement factory
will be similarly threatened, and the railway and automo-
bile works that use the Hoesch products will be gravely
handicapped, at the very time when an improvement
in communications is near the very top of priorities. But
forget all about that, and consider for a moment only the
human aspect. 30,000 souls will be affected. It will be
impossible to reabsorb in suitable work more than say a
third of the skilled men, many of whom are in the third
generation of service to the firm. .The rest will become, at
best, a species of slum labour, and will add a further bur-
den to the ruined finances of the city ; many, after decades
at the blast furnaces, will die off miserably. The fact that
the firm has one of the finest pension schemes in existence,
and that a part, if not all, of its benefits will be lost to the
men flung out, would have been worthy of mention in a
saner and more decent age.

And what could be madder or more wicked than to
throw tens of thousands of men out of work here and else-
where just in mid-winter and just in the districts suffering
most from the food crisis? If it had to be done, mightn’t a
better moment have been found?

The second firm to which I want to refer is Mathes and
Weber of Duisburg. This is one of the only two firms in the
British zone manufacturing soda. I haven’t the faintest
idea why it is to be closed down, and I dare say that a
rumour to the effect that one of our allies is financially
interested in the rival concern is so much malicious gossip.
But what I do know is that the Germans desperately need
washing-powder: that you can’t make washing-powder
without soda : and that if Mathes and Weber goes, Henkel,
the great soap firm, may have to go too. And I ask again
whether this isn’t madness or wickedness or both. I ought
to add that when I was there our Chemical Branch, which
is concerned about soap, was making the usual frantic
effort to secure a last-minute reprieve.

177

Or listen to this. The total capacity of the cement works
in the British zone is 7,717,000 tons. 25 of them, with a
capacity of 3,726,000 tons, are on the reparations list.
Orders have recently gone out to affix “Law 52” to these
works and this is often the first step in the process of
closing down. I shall be told that you can make pill-
boxes and Siegfried Lines out of cement. So you can ; but
you can also use it to rebuild Hamburg and Dusseldorf
and Dortmund — and Cologne.

What sort of re-education is this that we are doing, with
our mania for destruction? Is that the way to make men
democrats? Worst of all is the horrible uncertainty.
Every German knows that there are many hundreds of firms
on the reparations list; but no German knows what will
be the ultimate fate of his own. If we must behave like
vandals, at any rate let us publish a final list of the loot
and then have done.

I hate fascism from the bottom of my heart. From the
day Hitler came to power I thought of nothing from morn-
ing till night but how to prevent him and his accomplices
and dupes from having their evil way. But I say that if
norw we choose the path of destruction rather than of re-
construction : if we fill the German people with despair
rather than with hope: if we make them hate and despise
us, when they were ready for emotions of a very different
kind then the Nazis, in spite of everything, have won,
and tomorrow s world will be of their pattern and not of
ours.

§ (“)

THE LARGER AND THE SMALLER LUNACY
{From the New Statesman, Dec. 7 )

It is difficult to write about German industry without
making oneself look like a fool. The muddle and irration-
ality are so unbelievable that any attempt at describing
them must invite the retort “But of course there’s some

178

good reason that you just don’t happen to understand”.
I can only say that repeatedly during my visit I tried to
get explanations, but almost always with a complete lack
of success. No one knew more than his own bit of the story :
and when after weary journeys from place to place you
pieced the various bits together, they just didn’t make
sense. For all that, I think I know the explanation.

First, it is to be found in the way in which the whole
thing has developed from the earliest days, if developed is
the just word. When we first went in, this or that concern
was “reactivated” at various levels, and often at the very
lowest, to meet the immediate situation. I should judge
that the Army did a first-rate job in those early months.
But what was a virtue in the summer of 1945 became
criminal lunacy when it persisted indefinitely : and things
went from bad to worse when soldiers, acting ad hoc with
the speed of a military operation, were gradually replaced
by a vast and unco-ordinated bureaucratic machine, with
no real change in the basic system. The superimposition
of some attempt at planning, on a mere quarterly basis,
has affected the all-over position very little. What has been
totally lacking has been a strong controlling hand, which
many months ago should have substituted for a chaotic
series of spasms at the various levels a planned direction
from the top : and a planned direction based, not only on a
view that could look beyond next week, but on broad
consumer needs (in which I include the need for producer
goods) rather than on the competing demands of local
producers. Moreover organisation, such as it is, has taken
the form of parallel Branches that rarely meet. The coal
and steel controls only slightly modify this picture.

The second explanation is, of course, Potsdam. There
is an intellectual beauty about the completeness of the
vacuum which separates zonal desires and necessities on
the one hand from the impersonal operation of the
reparations machine, positive and negative, on the other.

i 79

./Eons, as it seems, ago there was some connection between
the two : for the whole thing started with a tentative list of
1 war potential” and “surplus” firms and factories put up
by the zone. That list has now acquired an independent
robot’s existence : bit by bit, in the form of embargoes on
reactivation, orders to affix Law 52, visits by inventory-
making commissions, and actual blowings-up and dis-
mantlings, it comes crashing like some great stupid steam-
roller into the zone (where meanwhile what Ibsen called
“the local situation” changes monthly), creating un-
certainty, confusion and terror. Branches and Divisions
which suddenly see their plans, or their apology for plans,
imminently menaced make frantic efforts to stay the
monster’s course : but usually in vain. This is no doubt an
over-simplified picture. The list is modified from time to
time : there are postponements, last-minute reprieves and
so on : but by and large the picture is accurate. After a
spate this autumn of placardings and inspections for
reparation purposes, as well as of official threats, the
position is at the moment obscure : the Times correspondent
reported from Berlin on November 28 an official statement
that “there will not be any further closing of iron and steel
plants [these alone are mentioned] until at least the end
of this year. . . . The statement contradicts the more
optimistic reports that there would be no further closures
this winter.”

Let me give some examples of the lunacy that results
from the operation of these two factors, and let me begin
with the comparatively trivial and end with matters of
life and death. I shall make no attempt to keep the one
type of muddle distinct from the other : it would, indeed,
be impossible to do so, for they are inextricably mixed up.
And I am using only a tiny percentage of the material
available.

For instance : (a) A blanket-making firm was allocated
coal — but no power to run its machines, (b) A pin and

180

needle factory was allowed to restart— but not to use its
stock of raw materials, without which it could do nothing,
(c) The Deutsche Delta Metall Gesellschaft of Dusseldorf
has been refused a licence. Its products are needed by
other metal industries. Duly licensed firms, therefore,
cannot carry out their planned production, (d) A firm in
North Rhine-W estphalia urgently needed a small quantity
of building materials for indispensable repairs. It was
granted them, but with the proviso that they must be
obtained outside the city. You have to get a special permit
to take a lorry more than 80 kilometres from its place of
residence. This permit was refused. ( e ) The only Dussel-
dorf concern able to repair street cars was given a licence
to operate that particular department. The licence was
withdrawn without reason given, and the installation and
personnel have been idle for months. (/) In the same city,
Military Government recently ordered a drilling machine
firm to vacate its premises within ten days. The effect on
several industries (machine tools, optics, railway building,
etc.) must be disastrous. The rumour was that a printing
works was to be established on the site. But there is an
idle printing works only 2 kilometres away.

There is a firm in Wesseling called the Union Rheinische
Kraftstoff A.G. Its product is synthetic fuel. It could
resume the production of petrol immediately, so that
imports, which are at present 80% of consumption, could
be reduced or even perhaps eventually discontinued.
The raw material is brown coal from neighbouring
Cologne, and the percentage used, relatively to the pro-
duct, is very small. But all attempts to get a permit have
failed. The reason: Potsdam prohibits the manufacture of
synthetic fuel. Meanwhile, or so I am told, cars in our
zone are being driven on synthetic fuel from Leuna, in
the Russian zone.

It is proposed to destroy the quays and deep-water
berths of Kiel harbour. If this is done, not only will Kiel

cease, as it should cease, to be a naval base : it will cease
to be a harbour at all, and no ships of any size will be able
to call there. Now the Kiel authorities, with commendable
pluck, are planning to build up a whole series of light
industries : but they are badly placed geographically, and
will certainly fail if their harbour, which is the natural
outlet, is lost to them. The highest British authorities put
the resultant unemployment at 150,000 out of a total
population of 250,000. The reason, again, is Potsdam.
But I have excellent authority for saying that the Russians,
far from destroying, are improving the harbours in their
zone — which marches with Schleswig-Holstein.

Even worse is the imminent plight of Hamburg. There
are, or were, three great ship-building works in the
harbour — Bloehm & Voss, Howaldt and Deutsche Werft.
Most of Bloehm & Voss has already been blown up — not
merely dismantled so that the material might be used
elsewhere, but dynamited into a mass of shapeless metal
that oppresses the mind with a sense of darker obscenity
even than the dust of Cologne, which at least was annihi-
lated, one remembers, under stress of war. Before the
dynamiting an attempt was made, from our side, to save
some very beautiful overhead cranes and electric motors :
really, it was asked, couldn’t they be taken down and sent
perhaps to England? There was a moment’s hesitation,
and then — “Blow ’em up !” (Plates 108-1 1 1.)

But four or five Bloehm & Voss installations neverthe-
less remain — among them a turbine repair shop, a saw-
mill, some small floating docks and a few exquisite cranes.
The turbine repair shop is the only one in Hamburg (and,
I rather think, in the whole British zone) capable of
repairing Hamburg’s turbines, which are rapidly getting
worn out. The sawmill is of the utmost importance for the
rehabilitation of the port, as the other sawmills in the
neighbourhood of Hamburg are already overtaxed, and
sawmills are a bottleneck anyhow. The floating docks are

invaluable for the repair of ships up to 15,000 tons. The
cranes, among the comparatively few surviving from the
war havoc, are badly wanted for handling goods. Never-
theless the arrangement was that every square inch of
Blohm & Voss was to be blown up, dismantled or sunk
by the end of this year. When I was in Hamburg, some of
our own people were trying their human best to prevent
the reparations monster from crashing on. But I doubt
whether they have succeeded: for the day I left Bunde
for the Dutch frontier I received a note from a high
authority giving “a list of factories which have now come
into the category of ‘condemned without hope of reprieve’ :
these will be allocated and dismantled in the immediate
future”. There, at the top of the list, were four Blohm &
Voss installations. I suppose at some time or other I shall
have the heart to enquire whether they include the turbine
repair shop and the sawmill and the floating docks.*

Howaldt was scheduled to be blown up or dismantled
after Blohm & V oss : but it is at the moment intact, and
as you come upon it in your launch after leaving Blohm &
Voss it seems to have the grace of a living thing. Deutsche
Werft is also said to be condemned. If these go, the port of
Hamburg will be done for, as all facilities for repairing as
well as for building ships will be at an end, and the place
will be shunned. (Plate 112.)

While on the subject of ships I may as well give three
examples of the minor lunacy. Item one. There were
thirteen fishing vessels at Bremerhaven which were of the
size permitted by Potsdam : but unfortunately they had
been used as minelayers. The Germans proposed to
reconvert them into fishing vessels. But no : we preferred
to sink them or purloin them, or whatever it may have
been, instead. Item two. There was a fishing boat a metre
longer than the permitted size. The Germans wished to

* My fears appear to have been justified. See Appendix for Mr.
Hynd’s reply to a question on this subject.

l8 3

lop off the offending inches — they put it in writing.
But we blew the boat up — not once but twice, for the first
time we didn’t succeed — before the very eyes of the
Hamburgers, and just at a moment when a food crisis was
at its height. “The people say” added Petersen, the still
friendly Burgomaster who told me the story, “ ‘The sea’s
full of fish, but they want to starve us.’ ” Item three.
Some four months ago a licence was granted at quadri-
partite level to build a hundred trawlers, in order to
increase facilities for the landing of fish. Then an argu-
ment started about size. The Control Commission stipu-
lated for 350 tons : the Germans pleaded for 500, pointing
out that the smaller sort would be grossly uneconomical
(the holds would be too small), and would be able to fish
only within a narrow radius, whereas the larger could go
to Iceland. The C.C.G. objected that trawlers of 500 tons
might be used as minesweepers, and were therefore war
potential. The dispute was still going on when I left
Hamburg. Meanwhile, the wretched German fish ration
has been reduced, and we complain that the cost of feeding
Germany is almost more than we can bear.

I shall be asked, I suppose, whether I forget the horrible
engines of war that Blohm & Voss produced. No, I don’t
forget them: I did my miserable best to warn people
about them long before 1939, at a time when others who
are now so tough about “the Germans” had a much
better stomach for Hitler and Goering than I ever had.
But I say that if there is one absolutely certain way of
making a repetition of the last few years inevitable, it is to
acquiesce in this godless destruction, and to drive a whole
people, with whom somehow we have to live, into hatred
and despair.

184

1 08. BJohm & Voss.

1 09. The

l8 5

same.

i86

same — the
remaining
cranes.

187

1 88

V

THE RE-EDUCATION OF GERMANY

§ W

HERRENVOLK

{From The Manchester Guardian, Dec. 2 )

I was not surprised during my visit by the Herrenvolk
atmosphere, in which you gasp and stifle if you happen to
have been brought up as a liberal. The general standard
of honour, devotion to duty and even ability in the Con-
trol Commission is higher than rumour had led me to
expect ; but the number of people I met who behaved in a
civilized fashion to the Germans — who mixed often and
freely with them, and treated them quite naturally as
equal human beings — was inconsiderable. I didn’t, un-
fortunately, come into contact with many “other ranks”,
and it may be that had I done so my all-over impression
would have been different. But the majority of officers and
civilians of officer status, or so I should judge, have prac-
tically no dealings at all with German males, except of a
purely official kind ; and this is not, on the whole, from
“bloody-mindedness”, but simply because that’s the
atmosphere — that’s the way ordinary daily life in an
occupied country works out, unless a special and con-
tinuous effort is made from the top to produce a different
situation. Though there are many very fine exceptions,
the general attitude varies from a disgusting offensiveness,
through indifference often identifiable with oblivion, to
that humane and almost unconsciously superior pater-
nalism which is characteristic of the “white” attitude to

189

“natives” at its best, or was when I was in Singapore in
1918. The indifferent and the paternal are far commoner
than the disgusting, and it was perhaps unfortunate that I
should have come across a specimen of the latter almost
immediately after my arrival, and then another a day or so
later. We were dining, not inadequately, at a comfortable
mess ; and there, in the presence of the German servants, a
person of some importance in the establishment thought
fit to say, and to say d haute voix, “I wouldn’t dream of
shaking hands with any German”. Such blatancy is com-
paratively rare ; but a more discreet discussion of Germans
and their sins, while Germans handed the dishes, was by no
means infrequent at messes at which I stayed or dined.

Here, as an example of something less crude but per-
haps even more poisonous in its cold officialism, is an order
that came out when I was in Hamburg: “Instructions in
respect of German civilians attending cinema performances
are cancelled, and a new procedure will be adopted. . . .
Under the revised system . . . German civilians may
only attend performances as guests of British personnel.

. . . Presence of German guests will NOT, in any cir-
cumstances, be allowed to exclude British personnel and
their families. . . . There will be two queues at each
cinema : (i) one for British and Allied Officers and those
of Officer status — no German civilians will be allowed in
this queue; (ii) one for British and Allied ‘other rank’
personnel and German civilian guests.” So if, you see, a
British officer took the Burgomaster of Hamburg to a
cinema, they would have to stand in separate queues —
the host with the British officers and the guest with the
tommies. In that order you have the present phase of the
British occupation in a nutshell : the Germans are no
longer pariahs, but they mustn’t inconvenience the British
and must keep their place.

In a certain city there is a certain hairdresser. Shortly
after the capitulation four cubicles were set aside for

British officers and eight for Germans. No German was
allowed to occupy one of the special British cubicles.
This hairdresser recently became very popular with
B.A.O.R. wives. One day a British lady had to wait some
twenty minutes before she could get attention. Next day a
major and captain visited the establishment, and told the
proprietor that if a British lady were kept waiting again he
would have his premises requisitioned. This alarmed the
hairdresser, and a German lady was told to leave a cubicle
in the middle of her hair-do. Then a very exalted per-
sonage took a hand, and the present arrangement is that
four cubicles are set aside for British officers (male), four
for British wives, and four for Germans. No German may
enter any of the eight cubicles set aside for non-German
personnel. The hairdresser is a very nervous individual,
and rather than lose his shop he even today “requests” a
German to leave one of the four cubicles when a British lady
appears.

Though there has recently been a loosening of the re-
strictions on social contacts, and even some encourage-
ment of them from the highest quarters, it is still extremely
difficult for an Englishman of officer type to meet a Ger-
man, except at rare intervals, on terms of normal equality.
Before going to Hamburg I made some enquiries of a
charming brigadier. I wanted to have a talk immediately
after my arrival, I said, with a very distinguished German
in that city, but not in his office : might I ask him to dine
with me at the Atlantic ? The answer was a very emphatic
no. Might I then perhaps entertain him in my bedroom?
No. What you had better do, he said, is to see whether
you can get Mil. Gov. to put a room at your disposal at
H.Q. — and, if you don’t want it too formal, he added with
genuine kindliness, have a few drinks ! I am glad I took
the precaution of enquiring, because a few days previously
a German journalist who had been invited by, I think, a
Swedish confrere to meet him at the Atlantic had been

pounced on in the vestibule, asked “Are you a German?”,
and quickly hustled out when he confessed that yes, he
was. Incidentally, he had spent some years in a con-
centration camp.

You may now ask a German to a meal at your mess if
you get the approval, and ask him in the name, of the
mess as a while. But though I was in Germany for six
weeks, and stayed at messes nearly all the time, I saw no
single German at any one of them. My own experience in
this matter was peculiarly unfortunate. Having given due
notice and received the necessary permission, I invited to
dine with me, at what is officially a Headquarters Mess
but really a hotel de grand luxe, a brilliant young German
of my acquaintance. By a horrible mischance his British
chief was dining at the next table. Later on in the evening
I felt a certain strain, and noticed a look of blank fury on
the face of my charming, humane and highly competent
conducting officer, who happened to be an Irishman. It
appeared that one of the colonels had sent for him, rated
him soundly (in ignorance, apparently, that all formalities
had been complied with), and threatened to have me
removed, on the technical ground that visits at that par-
ticular mess were limited to a week. My Irishman threw
his weight about, and interspersed his remarks with the
nqmes of Mr. Hynd, Sir Sholto Douglas, Mr. Attlee — and,
for all I know, though he didn’t dare own up to this, His
Majesty the King. The upshot was that the courteous
President of the Mess Committee told me how honoured
they were by my presence, and begged me to stay as long as
it might suit me.

In another city, three young Control Commission
officers who were being transferred elsewhere wished to
take a farewell meal at the house of a very distinguished
German who was head of the “parallel” German organisa-
tion. They asked permission : this was first given, but next
day peremptorily withdrawn. So they gave up the idea

of a meal, and just went to say good-bye instead. They
were severely reprimanded for doing so.

The plain fact is that there are two worlds in Germany
today, the world of the conquered and the world of the
conquerors. They meet at the peripheries, but their hearts
beat in an inhuman isolation. I was talking to a high
British official in Hamburg one evening : I had seen a man
dying that morning at the hospital, had spent the after-
noon in cellars where tens of thousands of Hamburgers
live, and not yet being adequately hardened looked, I
suppose, a trifle shaken. He asked me what was the
matter, and I told him. “I wouldn’t know anything about
that” he replied, quite sympathetically. “I come to my
office in the morning, do a hard day’s work, and then go
back to the mess and relax. For knowing anything about
the life of the Hamburgers I might just as well be in
Whitehall.”

I was not surprised by any of this, as I said at the begin-
ning, because previous visitors had warned me of what I
might expect. But I wondered, and I wonder still, whether
the best way to “re-educate” people cursed by a Herrenvolk
tradition is to behave like Herrenvolk — if in the main very
kind and decent Herrenvolk — yourselves.

§ (“)

TOTALITARIAN DEMOCRACY
{From The Manchester Guardian, Dec. 3 )

And the same might be said about militarism. Wherever
you go in Germany the military character of the occupa-
tion stares you in the face. Enormous posters — “To the
Yacht Club”, “To the Officers’ Club”, “To Guards
H.Q..”, “Entry Strictly Forbidden to Civilians \i.e.,
Germans]” — you are assaulted by them everywhere. You
go into an office, and one of the first things you are likely
to see is “This lavatory reserved for British personnel”.
The huge Victory Club in Hamburg, which might house

*93

thousands of cellar-dwelling Germans, blazes away by
night in the ruined and darkened city. Naafi gift-shops
and the like, which are no doubt necessary, are sometimes
to be seen flaunting themselves with crammed shop-
windows on conspicuous streets— not from any calculated
cruelty, but because psychological reactions are ignored or
more commonly just overlooked. The result of it all is that
when German liberals talk to German youth about Ger-
man militarism, the reply is — I’ve been told it again and
again — “But British militarism is just as bad.”

There is something graver, however, than these
militaristic indiscretions, or even than our Herrenvolk
superiority. Whether under Nazi or Soviet influence—
and no one would underestimate the difficulties inherent
in the quadripartite complication — we are behaving as if
you could make men democrats by penalising them for
their opinions, shackling their freedom of expression, and
ticketing a vast section of the population into black (as we
see it), very dark (ditto), rather dark, grey and white. In
other words, we are trying to impose a formalistic demo-
cracy by totalitarian methods. You just can’t do it. You
can create democracy only by creating the conditions for
democracy ; if men are to have the chance of becoming
democrats, they must breathe the spacious air of personal
freedom and intellectual responsibility. There is simply no
other way. I know very well the arguments on the other
side . if people read ‘bad” books their minds will be
poisoned ; if the grey or even the half-grey are left without
tabs on them they may intrigue underground ; and so on.

I reply— and what have we come to, that I should have to
reply at all? — that if you censor a man’s reading you make
him a slave, and therefore excellent raw-material for the
first shoddy fanatic that may be out to manipulate him ;
and if you forbid a man any decent employment and de-
prive him of his pension it isn’t very likely that he will
become a useful and contented member of society. Of

i 94

course, there’s a risk both ways ; but in the one case you’re
taking a risk with God and in the other case with the
Devil.

I have space to deal only with two aspects of this matter.
Books first. The book famine in Germany is horrible. It is
said that if a bookseller showed in his window a book about
some obscure Indochinese dialect (if there is such a thing)
a queue would form up for it almost as long as the bread
queues I saw in Diisseldorf. The libraries, booksellers,
publishers have suffered a triple catastrophe. First they
were “nazified”; that is to say, all books by “Marxists”,
Jews and anyone ideologically offensive to the regime
were sent to the bonfire. Then they were bombed ; and if
you are in doubt about how many books may have sur-
vived go and have a look at what was once the city of
Cologne, and you will have your answer. Finally we came
along, we British, and proceeded to “denazify”. This
hideous word, which in its very syllables expresses a world
of intellectual shame and a posthumous capitulation to
Hitler, at first meant purging German society of Nazi
influences ; but now it is also used with men as its object — -
you “denazify” a man by giving him the sack and making
him clear away rubble.

The “directive” under which we purged the public
libraries, booksellers and publishers — and for all I know
also such private libraries as survived, if any one had the
time or taste for snooping about in them — required the
removal of all literature which included Nazi propaganda,
contributed to military training or education, or “con-
tained propaganda directed against the United Nations”.
To say nothing about the first two clauses, the third is pure
and shameless Hitlerism in reverse. How has it been
carried into effect? Well, here is what we have done with
the Hamburg Public Library. All books dealing even
remotely with Indian nationalism have been removed—
among them Romain Rolland’s “Mahatma Gandhi” and

x 95

Tagore’s “Nationalism”. Stored away too, and ready for
shipping out of the country, are Fiilop-Miller’s famous
“Mind and Face of Bolshevism” : a book by Jack London
of which the title escapes me, but something to do with
slums : and, to round the whole thing off, Lenin’s “Im-
perialism”. I can’t imagine why Hitler spared it, unless
he already had his eye on August 1 939 ; but I know very
well why we have repaired his omission. In that not very
attractively written masterpiece Lenin analyses British as
well as German and every other sort of imperialism ; so no
German must be allowed to read it. As for the Russians,
they have published a book of prohibited literature : it
runs to 526 closely printed pages.*

Having so satisfactorily proved our zeal in prohibition,
have we shown an equal enthusiasm for fostering “safe”,
“suitable” or “democratic” literature? By no means.
For all the shortage here, our book riches are beyond the
dreams of any German for many years to come. Now
while we imported into Great Britain 200,000 tons of
chemical pulp, the Control Commission had the greatest
difficulty in getting, during the same period, 16,000 tons
for Germany. The population of the British zone is half
that of Great Britain; and a little extra chemical pulp
would permit of considerably increased production of
paper, without additional wood or coal. What then does
all our talk of “re-education” amount to? When I was in
Diisseldorf translations of only two English books had
been published since victory in North Rhine-Westphalia,
which carries half the population ; and I didn’t think much
of the selection.

The “directive” that controls the output of current Ger-
man literature, such as it is, is even more drastic than that
by which the libraries were purged. No publisher may
publish a book which “reflects adversely upon the Military
Government or any of the Allied Powers or is calculated
* See Appendix.

196

to create dissension between the Allied Powers”. A serious
study of Potsdam by a German economist : an objective
comparison of Soviet communism and Western demo-
cracy : a translation of Lord Beveridge’s Times articles :
a novel or play about the frustration of German youth
— these are a few of the pamphlets or books the issue of
which would be unthinkable. What it amounts to is a
total ban on most of the topics of living interest. And that
is what we call “re-education” and democracy.

I have left myself little space to deal with the “denazifi-
cation” not of books but of men. Let me say only this.
There have already been three “denazification” proce-
dures; and now there is to be a fourth, under which
not only anybody who in future may apply for a large
variety of jobs, or may be denounced or reported, will
be placed in one of five categories (with appropriate
penalties in the case of four), but everyone who has
already filled in a Fragebogen or questionnaire on a pre-
vious occasion will come up automatically for “cate-
gorisation”. This will mean the re-examination of nearly
a million and a half Fragebogen ; and people previously
“passed”, and who therefore thought themselves safe,
may now find themselves subjected to penalties and re-
strictions. The uncertainty will be horrible. The Frage-
bogen itself must be seen to be believed. There are 133
questions — and among them the following: “Have you
any relatives who have held office ... in any of the
organisations listed from 41 to 95 above?” “List on a
separate sheet the titles and publishers of any publications
from 1923 to the present, which were written in whole or
in part by you and all the public addresses made by you,
giving subject, date and circulation or audience.” “List
all journeys . . . outside Germany . . . persons visited.”
The German wits add a final question: “Did you play
with toy soldiers as a child? If so, what regiment?” *

* See Appendix.

I asked one of the highest authorities on this procedure
how long the re-examination of the Fragebogen would
take. “About two years” he said — “but of course” he
added “the whole thing will be discontinued before then.”
Then why, in the name of the liberal tradition of which we
were once so justly proud, don’t we set an early term to
this disgraceful nonsense immediately, and give Germany
the one thing she above all must have if she is not to go
down into the pit and drag us all down with her — a new
start?

§ (i‘i)

A FURTHER NOTE ON HERRENVOLK

The disparity between British and German living con-
ditions, to some extent inevitable, is far greater than it
need be. While millions of Germans are living four, seven
or nine to a hole, our officers’ messes are at worst pleas-
antly comfortable, and such of the senior ones as I visited
were, for the most part, quietly and discreetly luxurious.
Every time I entered such a mess before dinner the atmo-
sphere reminded me very vividly of Singapore in 1918:
there was the same sense of happy relaxation, the same
feeling that you belonged to a privileged caste, the same
climate of dignified well-being. I am not suggesting that
many of these people did not work extremely hard, nor
that, except in one or two cases, there was anything in the
nature of vulgar display. The whole thing was far too
well-mannered for that.

After the preliminary drinks, one definitely “dined” ;
and though the amount of food in any one course was not
excessive, the number of courses, so far as the senior messes
were concerned, almost invariably was. Further on I re-
produce some menus, and these are not exceptional: I
just slipped a menu card from time to time into my pocket
when I was able to do so without observation. Germans
meanwhile were eating as I have described above.

198

Most of the finest buildings still standing in the various
cities are used as British messes or clubs of one kind or
another, when not in occupation as offices. Many of our
higher officials live in considerable state. I visited three of
the four Regional Commissioners and stayed with one of
them : the more modest type of residence was a mansion,
and the less modest a palace. I am not saying this by way
of criticism of the Regional Commissioners, for at least one
of them, I know, intensely disliked the pomp in which he
lived, and was planning to use part of the enormous space
for unhappy children : but however strongly they might dis-
approve, being a species of colonial governor they had to
submit. You could see the same kind of establishment, I
was told, often enough in Berlin, but I didn’t go there and
so cannot speak from personal observation.

It is awkward to criticise the hospitality which I almost
invariably received, but I ought to mention that at one
mess at which I stayed in a particularly ruined city my
bedroom measured 720 square feet. It was admirably
furnished with two beds, though I had no bed-fellow,
and a private bathroom was attached. There was central
heating, a continuous supply of hot water, and “every con-
venience”. As I lay in bed one night I happened to read a
memorandum prepared by Dr. Arnold, the able and
humane Burgomaster of Diisseldorf, for the religious dele-
gation that had just preceded me. “The population very
much regrets to see” he wrote “that the constructing and
repairing of buildings for entertainment purposes is carried
out by the Occupation Forces on such a large scale as
would even have been remarkable in pre-war Germany,
and that building material and labour are being used for
this purpose, which might be utilised for the building of
dwellings. On the other hand it is planned to close down
factories manufacturing cement and building materials.”
In this connection, I have already mentioned the Victory
Club at Hamburg (Plate 1 1 3) ; it may be added, to give

*99

a little more precision, that the labour and materials em-
ployed on it could construct 1,500 dwelling units and house
6,000 persons. The total cost of the work, which started in
November 1945, is estimated at 13,000,000 marks. 1,500
men and 35 contractors are already engaged on the enter-
prise, which is expected to require 350,000 bricks, 800 tons
of cement, 260 tons of iron, and so on. These are the figures
of the German housing authority, which also states that “the
works comprise dining-rooms, shops, rooms for manage-
ment, ball-rooms, dancing-clubs, play-rooms, reading-
rooms, sports-amusement facilities, restaurants, lounges,
rest-rooms, bath-rooms etc., including staircases and lifts.
Instead of the former cinema and theatre-hall a big ball-
room will be built.”

Now it happens that in a finely planned working-class
quarter of Hamburg not only are the roads and sewers
intact (which is half the battle), but the outside walls of
the magnificent blocks are quite undamaged. (Plates
114-116.) If labour were employed here speedily, part of
the Hamburg population, and in particular people living
in the cellars below, could be decently rehoused with great
economy; if, however, the buildings remain open to the
sky, they will rapidly disintegrate. But nothing is being
done about it, while work on the Victory Club proceeds.

A good deal has been said about the Hamburg Project,
but I find that most people don’t know what it is. There
are only three more or less undamaged areas in Hamburg,
and one of them is away by the river. In the other two'
which are known as Zone A and Zone B, a great body of
Control Commission personnel from all over the zone is to
be concentrated, with office accommodation in other parts
of Hamburg. This will be, in other words, a sort of Garden
City for the C.C.G. When I was there, a total force of
14,226 labourers was engaged on the Project, of whom
approximately 3j5°° were employed on rehousing Ger-
mans evicted, or to be evicted, because of it, and on pro-

200

viding alternative office accommodation. That gives you a
net figure of more than 10,000 labourers, as against 1,700
employed on ordinary civilian repairs for the miserably
housed Hamburgers.* Meanwhile, perhaps 17, 000 Germans
have been evicted from their homes in Hamburg for one
reason or another. This is a German figure ; the British
put it lower.

Mr. Hynd’s repeated statement that Germans are never
evicted until suitable alternative accommodation has been
found was furiously denied to me, not only by Germans,
but also by the British housing officer in one of the most
seriously affected centres. In Dusseldorf the average living
space per person is 3-2 square metres : if on top of that you
proceed to turn out a lot of Germans to house a few British,
where could the Almighty Himself find “suitable alter-
native accommodation” ? On the other side of the account,
the evidence is indisputable that British accommodation —
I am talking now of general living quarters, not of messes —
is often absurdly lavish, not merely by comparison with
German housing conditions, but absolutely. I have recently
received from two different persons — one a Control Com-
mission officer and the other a relief worker — -a statement
of the position in a small town, the population of which has
been more than doubled by the inflhx of “expellees”. 40
Britishers are living in 13 1 rooms from which Germans
have been evicted, and 213 rooms in requisitioned board-
ing houses, containing 213 beds, are occupied by 69
Britishers, 5 offices, and a sergeants’ mess. The occupants
are partly C.C.G. personnel and partly “families”.

In this connection, is it realised that when Germans are
evicted they have to leave their furniture behind them,
including beds but not, mercifully, bed-clothes? No single
British action has caused such bitter hostility, for many of
these people, have been bombed out three or four times,
and specially treasure what they have managed to save.

* See Appendix.

201

They are told that their things will be returned to them
when the premises are derequisitioned. This is certainly
the rule, though there have been scandalous breaches of
it, at any rate temporarily; but it is cold comfort to be
told that you will get your bed back one day when mean-
while it is virtually impossible to buy another. In spite of
everything written in this book, I only once felt ashamed
of being a British citizen ; and that was when I was told
about a German musician whose bed — let us call a spade
a spade— had been stolen from him.

Every C.C.G. officer receives, as a matter of right, 200
cigarettes, a box of matches, a piece of soap and a fair
amount of chocolate every week. The German ration of
cigarettes is about seven a week, and they get once
a month either a small tablet of “schwimm” soap that
looks as if it would disappear after a couple of applications,
or a piece of nondescript material, detestably hard, with
which I found it impossible to wash at all. In addition, an
Englishman could buy at the Atlantic a piece of soap every
day, as well as towels and other similar articles of necessity
or pleasure. I tested this out for myself. I was told that
you could freely buy in the same way at country clubs and
the like.

The wife of an education officer told me that though she
and her husband shared everything equally with their two
German servants they still had twice as much food as in
England. I give this statement, which I did not attempt to
corroborate, for what it is worth ; but I can think of no
reason why the lady should have wished to deceive me.

Food and drink are fantastically cheap. I lunched or
dined at such places as the Atlantic at Hamburg and a club
at Celle for about a third of what a similar meal would cost
at home.

The fact is that life is far too easy for the Control Com-
mission. I know that this will be furiously denied, and not

202

least by some of the most humane men out there, whom I
learned very greatly to respect: but that is because, in
occupation conditions, many even of the best people have
inevitably lost any vivid realisation of the contrast between
their own conditions and those of the people among whom
they live.

§ (iv)

SOME MENUS AT OFFICERS’ MESSES

(The mistakes have been retained)

(I)

Cheese — Biscuits

Consomme in cups

Coffee

Fried Soles in butter
Fresh Potatoes

Friday, November 1,
1946

Dutch Steak

Mashed Potatoes
Cauliflower

(3)

St. Germain Soup

Raspberry Cream

Cheese

Braised Beef
Cauliflower au Gratin
Fondant Potatoes

Coffee

Tuesday, October 8, 1946

(2)

Flors d’oeuvres

Tomato Soup

Apple Tart
Cream

Welsh Rarebit

Coffee

Saturday, November 2,
!94 6

Rumpsteak

Garnie

Chip Potatoes

(4)

Hors d’oeuvres

Creamed Caramel

Consomme

2°3

Vienna Steak
Red Cabbage
Carrots

Castle Potatoes
Savorie

Cheese and Biscuits
Coffee

Sunday, November 3,

i 946

( 5 )

Mockturtle Soup

Roast Pork
Brown Sauce
Stuffing
Beetroot Salad

Pears

Ice Cream

Cheese Straws
Coffee

Monday, November 4,
^46

( 6 )

Cream Soup

Vienna Steak
Curry Sauce
Peas
Salad

Saute Potatoes
Liqueur Fruit Salad
Savorie

Cheese and Biscuits
Coffee

Sunday, November 10,
1946

204

Victory Club,
Hamburg.

206

1 1 5. The
same.

1 16 . The same. Inhabited cellars below.

207

118. The
same. By my
photographer,
taken in July.

209

1 1 9 . The

same.

120 . The

same.

210

211

212

123 . The

same.

124 . The

same.

21 3

No ventilation.
German News
Service photo
graph (July).

same.

21 5

127 . Housing in Hamburg. German News Service

photograph. '

2l6

W8. Housing in Hamburg, German News Service
photograph, July.

217

2l8

131 . Hamburg. Inhabited by six people,
including a baby. The room is wet.
Salvation Armv photograph.

children,

• S & c. cx E jj .5

G i O ^ CL, ^ ►-«
L « ■“ 5 N .5

l£ 5 8?

& IS o

t- ■§.

221

222

133. The

same.
Getting up.

same.

223

& Voss, now
unemployed.
Photograph by
German News
Service, fulv.

1 36 . Same cellar. Bedroom for one of the families,
fust big enough for two beds. Sink used by other
family also. No window — small opening in nailed
door. Walls wet. Photograph by German News
Service , July.

226

1 37 . The
same. Lavatory
three feet
from bed.

VI

ISOLATION OF THE MIND

To the Editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

Sir, — There were times during my visit to Germany
when I thought the intellectual and spiritual starvation
to be even worse than the physical. Two or three weeks
ago the Professor of Law in one of the great Universities
took some of his precious law books to a friend who knew
his way about the Black Market, and asked him to sell
them for a pound of butter. His wife, he said, was des-
perately undernourished, and he had no further use for
the books anyhow, as he was too feeble to read. Such
tragedies are common enough, and by no means in Ger-
many alone. But I met many young students who were
quite resigned to physical hardship, but not to intellectual
isolation.

I have dealt with the shortage of books, and particularly
of English books, elsewhere. If a German happens to have a
friend in Britain ; if, further, he happens to know of the
“Save Europe Now” parcels scheme, then he can cadge a
book every now and again. I met, in point of fact, no single
German who knew of this facility. But German after
German, when they learned that I was a publisher,
begged me to send them English books — this or that book
if obtainable, but, if not, any books of any kind.

What applies to books applies also to newspapers and
journals of every sort. De Crespigny, the Regional Com-
missioner for Schleswig-Holstein, told me when I was
staying with him the other day that he receives in all 41
sets of English papers and periodicals for the whole of

22 7

his region, the population of which is about 3,000,000.
Until recently an ordinary German citizen was totally
unable to obtain British newspapers or periodicals in any
way whatever; now he can get them only if an English
friend posts them out at his own expense. This closure on
intellectual traffic is two-way. For a German to send
German journals out of Germany is strictly prohibited.
My friend Dr. Grimme, Minister of Education for Han-
over, was good enough, two or three months ago, to write
a little “piece” about me in a German newspaper. He
enclosed the cutting in a letter. It was removed by the
censor.

There is no greater danger in the Europe of to-day than
this intellectual isolation of Germany, which is all the
more disastrous as following 1 2 years of Hitlerism. I beg,
therefore, (1) that visits should be arranged, on a really
extensive scale, between the staffs and students of British
and German schools and universities; (2) that parties of
British youth should go out to Germany and live for two or
three weeks with German youth on the German ration
scale ; (3) that parties of German youth should similarly
be allowed to come to Britain ; (4) that British universities
should find out what books are urgently needed by German
universities, should buy them by private subscription and
should send them out through “Save Europe Now” or
otherwise — I believe something of the kind already exists
in embryo ; (5) that everybody with a friend in Germany
should send him good English books of any kind, asking
him to pass them on if he doesn’t want them; this may be
done at the moment through “Save Europe Now”, and
perhaps by parcel post later on ; (6) that the public should
take full advantage of the little known Control Office
scheme for the supply of books and periodicals to informa-
tion centres and public libraries in the British zone:
gifts for this purpose should be sent to Miss Goodwille,
Room 12, Control Office for Austria and Germany,

228

Norfolk House, St. James’s Square; (7) that writers,
university people, and scientists should write regularly to
their “opposite numbers”, giving them some little informa-
tion about developments here in an endeavour to mitigate
their isolation.

Finally, I would urge — though I suppose this is hopeless
— that when the time comes for our publishers’ paper ration
to be put up to 1 00 per cent, of pre-war, in the case of the
larger publishers the extra percentage should go instead,
for the time being, to Germany. There would be no
material dividends ; but there would be spiritual ones.

Yours, etc.

Victor Gollancz.

14, Henrietta Street, November 21st.

229

VII

GERMAN YOUTH

To the Editor of the Observer.

Sir,

The worst thing in Germany— worse than the mal-
nutrition, the overcrowding, the gaping footwear in
the schools — is the spiritual condition of the youth.
I thought I had touched bottom in Julich, where in
cellar after cellar I found 5, 6, 9 people — fathers, mothers,
children, adult daughters and sons — all jumbled together
without light or air, and lacking even the pretence of
any decent privacy. But a conference with young people
at Dusseldorf a day later, and then another, were still
more horrible ; and what I learned then confirmed
similar experiences with university students at Kiel and
Hamburg.

The attitude of the youth varies from one of a puzzled
bewilderment, still friendly to the British— these are in a
minority — to bitterness, cynicism and a growing hostility
to us and all our works. The mood is not (yet) pro-Nazi : it
shows rather a nihilistic contempt for government and
governments of every kind. They contrast our promises
with our deeds : the B.B.C. told us, they say, that you were
coming to liberate us, but what has it all amounted to?

I mention democracy; and they ask whether democracy
means starvation rations and lack of the barest necessities
or turning people out of their homes and seizing their
furniture, or blowing up shipyards, closing down factories,
and throwing tens of thousands of men out of employ-

230

ment. I risk a question about Nuremberg ; and they say —
at the very best — yes, they were guilty, but so are the
Allies : look at the expellees, sick, starving and robbed,
not thousands of them but millions. Many jeer openly at
Nuremberg. I met no single young person who denied the
Nazi guilt ; but I met very few who thought it in any way
speck’, or different in kind from that of all politicians
every where. They talk a good deal about justice ; and they
want to know whether it is just to hale a man off to intern-
ment without trial and release him as innocent a year
later. They talk, too, about their ostracism by the British
on the one hand, and the behaviour of our troops to
German girls on the other.

At the root is despair about the future. Time after time
I was told “We don’t mind how hard life is if only we can
have something to hope for”. But they see their factories
being dismantled; they know that hundreds of other
factories are on the list; and the majority are, convinced
that we are determined to ruin them, partly by way of
punishment but mainly as commercial rivals. The minority
wonders.

And yet — I am convinced of it after contact with them —
they had, and perhaps still have, the makings in them of
good democrats. After Belsen, the worst of all my ex-
periences was when a university student at Hamburg
said in an agonized voice “For God’s sake don’t make us
Nazis”. If we are to save them we must ( i ) stop doing the
things they justly criticise, and give instead a living example
of the liberal tradition; (2) put a little psychological
understanding into our propaganda, which, on such sub-
jects as war guilt or the world food situation, has been
contemptible when it has not been non-existent; (3)
increase the establishment of the education and youth
section of the C.C.G., which is doing devoted work, but
is as grotesquely understaffed as Trade and Industry is
overstaffed, and is frustrated at every turn into the

23 1

bargain ; (4) remove the nightmare of uncertainty from
the German future — which is to say, abandon Potsdam.

Yours, etc.,

Victor Gollancz.

1 4 Henrietta Street, November 2 1 .

138 . Bov iii an elementary school at Diisseldorf.

2 33

139. Boys in an elementary school at Diisseldorf.

Notice the bare feet.

140 . Children
in another
school in
Dii sseldorf.
All looked ill,

141. The

236

same.

142 . Hamburg. Tripartite Nutrition Committee
examining a school boy. Photograph by German
News Service, August.

I

143. Boy in Hamburg searching for food in a garbage
tin. I should not have published this photo graph
had not an education officer at Diisseldorf told me
that he saw the same thing himself while I was
in that city. German News Service.

iV

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2 39

144 . Names on a door.

VIII

SUMMARY

{From The New Statesman , November 30 th)

Mr. Hynd’s recent speech in the House about Ger-
many displayed a mixture of complacency and mis-
information that is really beyond belief. This winter, he
suggested, will be better than last. Of all the people I
met during my six weeks’ visit, I cannot think of a single
one who would not laugh bitterly at such a suggestion.
Here are a few of the reasons :

1. The Germans face this winter with physical and
moral resistance lowered by a ration-card diet, for at least
six months, of 1,000 calories. As everyone now knows, the
recent “increase” was largely mythical. Perhaps 20 per
cent, of the town population actually lives on this diet —
and you can see what some of them look like in the
hospitals and holes. The majority get just enough extra
from the black market or otherwise to keep wretched body
and despairing soul together. Apart from calories the diet,
whether supplemented or not, is horribly deficient in fats
and animal protein. The result has been a catastrophic
increase during the year, in district after district, of all the
evils associated with gross malnutrition — underweight,
lassitude, hunger oedema and tuberculosis.

2. The appalling housing situation has been pro-
gressively worsened by the influx of vast numbers of
“expellees” — and to a lesser extent by the incursion of
B.A.O.R. wives and by such iniquities as the Hamburg
Project.

3. People have been wearing out their last personal

240

and household possessions ; and the supply of new articles
to replace them has been hopelessly inadequate.

4. The commercial and industrial machine, such as it
has been, is visibly running down. Coal is, of course, the
crux. Mr. Hynd mentioned the recent increase in coal
production ; but he omitted to mention, not only that it
was a “pick up” to only a little over the figure of output
before the March ration cut, but also that the 6| million
tons of coal and coke in stock at the end of the war were
down to half a million tons by November, over and above
an essential working reserve. Nor did he mention that raw
steel production, which was 250,000 tons a month in
August, was expected to be only 190,000 in October, on
account of the coal cut. But shortage of coal is not the
whole explanation. In addition (a) Stocks of all raw
materials have become progressively exhausted. ( b ) Owing
to this, as well as to the resulting necessity for inferior
substitutes, the poor productivity of labour, the small
percentage of capacity worked, and so on, it would be
difficult enough to avoid huge losses even if there were a
rational price and wages policy. But there is none : the
general principle being to hold prices and wages at pre-
occupation level, while discontinuing subsidies on the
one hand and increasing working-class burdens by way of
direct and indirect taxation on the other. The result is
that business men must become hopelessly indebted to
their banks, or sell their wares on the black market, or go
slow in order to lose as little as possible. Many prefer the
last. They keep their men nominally employed, but really
hanging about day after day doing nothing. The amount
of concealed unemployment is enormous. ( c ) Even such
goods as are produced are to a large extent hidden, as
producers, uncertain about the future of the currency and
their own businesses, prefer goods to marks. Experts put this
hoarding at as high as 50 per cent. ( d ) An indispensable
condition, not for revival but for preventing a final break-

241

down, is a vigorous import-export programme. Nothing of
the sort exists. I shall hardly be believed when I say that
even to-day no German is allowed to send a business letter
of any kind abroad.

The position in the early autumn was authoritatively
summed up in the plain statement that trading had
practically ceased.

I take the opportunity, as I pass these pages for press,
to add some information that has become available since
the above was written. Dr. Schumacher stated in London
(■ Manchester Guardian, Dec. 3) that “last week, just before
he left Germany, the cut of between 30 and 35 per cent,
in industrial consumption of power (imposed at the begin-
ning of October in North Rhine-Westphalia) had been
increased to 60 per cent.” And “Peregrine” reported to
The Observer from Berlin on December 7 that “steel output
is still decreasing”.

5. The uncertainty of life — no one knows what may
happen to him next week or month or year — grows
increasingly desperate. There are two main causes. The
first is Potsdam and the second is denazification.

6. As a result of all this and much more, we have lost — I
pray for the time being only — the game of “re-education”.
In particular, we have all but lost the German youth.

What then to do? (1) Send a Resident Minister of
Cabinet rank to the British zone. (2) Do at least what we
can to ease the food situation at the cost of some national
sacrifice. It is nonsense to say we can do nothing; I
repeat, as one example, that if the Germans of our zone
had been given the amount of meat by which our ration
was increased a few months ago, they would thereby have
received a regular additional 70 per cent. (3) Stop the
export of coal for at least six months. (4) Unless we come
to an agreement with Russia within a month, denounce
Potsdam, and publish a final list of factories to be dis-
mantled. (5) Put a term, and a very early one, to denazi-

242

fication. Find a policy which, without offending against
the spirit of democracy and within the limits of democratic
procedure, will (a) preserve acquired skills for German
industry, ( b ) prevent men who think mainly in terms of
private or national profit from getting a grip of the
industrial machine, whether nationalised or not, and (c)
give everyone, including those just mentioned, the chance
of a decent and honourable livelihood. (6) Reform the
financial structure without a moment’s unnecessary delay.

(7) Press on with a five-year plan for the rehabilitation of
German industry, on the broad basis of public ownership
and with a really adequate import-export programme.

(8) Stop behaving like inefficient totalitarian, and try
a little liberalism or Christianity instead.

Let me say again, to avoid misunderstanding, that while
there are too many careless, stupid, unsuitable and perhaps
not over-scrupulous men in the Control Commission, the
proportion of personnel, both military and civilian, which
reaches the finest possible standard of devotion, ability
and honour is splendidly high. But these men, almost
without exception, are frustrated by the unco-ordinated
working of a bureaucratic machine, by the growing divorce
between Berlin and the zone, and above all by the absence
of a policy in London.

APPENDIX

“WHAT SAY THEY?”

Of the statements made in those parts of this book
which have already appeared in the Press only one has
been publicly challenged by Norfolk House. A week or
so after the article Totalitarian Democracy” (page 98)
appeared in The Manchester Guardian, Mr. Houghton,
Director of Information Services, wrote to that paper
(December 12th) and attempted to controvert my remarks
about the “denazification” of books. What he said in
detail will be gathered from my reply (December 13th),
which was as follows :

“Mr. Houghton’s letter is another example of mis-
information at Norfolk House. First, public libraries.
On October 23 I interviewed the British official in charge
of the Hamburg public library. He produced a very long
duplicated list of the books removed before the present
official’s time. It contained those I mentioned. They
were not ‘segregated in the library’ as Mr. Houghton
suggests. They were in store at the offices of this official,
and he, produced those I wished to examine. Those
‘wanted’ abroad were presently, I believe, to be shipped
out of the country. He further produced Control Council
Order (May 13, 1946) under which this ‘denazification’
proceeds. It prohibits the circulation not merely of books
‘supporting militarism, nationalism, and racialism’ but—
as Mr. Houghton omits, though it was -the whole point of
my article— books ‘containing propaganda directed against
the United Nations . It is true that ‘the responsibility for
the complete handing over of the above mentioned

literature rests with the holders as well as with burgo-
masters and local authorities’, but it is also true that
‘control over the execution of the order will be exercised
by the . . . representatives of the . . . occupying Powers’.
My informant also said — I have a note made at the time —
that ‘the Regional Information Control Units (British)
work within the Control Council order of May 13’. If
Mr. Houghton thinks that, in view of all this, my sentence
‘here is what we have done with the Hamburg public
library’ is incorrect, he is welcome to his point.

“In dealing with current literature Mr. Houghton
confuses books, about which I was writing, with news-
papers, about which I was not. The policy for newspapers
is fairly liberal, though the very existence of the ban on
certain types of criticism must have a paralysing effect,
and the atmosphere can be gauged by the remark of one
of our press officers to the effect that he saw German
editors almost daily — ‘I go to them when it is nothing of
real importance, and only summon them to me when it
is’. But the book situation is very different. Every publisher
receives a document of ‘instructions’, which informs him
that the ‘licensee is personally responsible that the works
published under this licence shall not include anything
which reflects adversely upon . . . any of the Allied
Powers’. According to the same document, he may
either submit a proposed publication for approval in
writing, or may risk it and deliver to the book censorship
bureau a first copy. After at last getting a licence (for which
he has to fill up four questionnaires, containing in all 2 1 3
questions) how many publishers are going to risk losing it
by publishing a book that ‘reflects adversely on any of the
Allied Powers’ ? I was indeed informed by a British official
in charge of books that ‘we encourage publishers to submit
their books for censorship in proof form — because they
won’t go to the risk of setting the work up unless they are
quite certain it is O.K.’.

“Let me put a plain question to Mr. Houghton. During
the last few months would publication in German of a
book exposing the idiocy of Potsdam or attacking Soviet
Communism have been remotely possible?

“As to Lord Beveridge’s ‘Times’ articles, if they were
published in Hamburg in book or pamphlet form (it is
this to which I was explicitly referring, and not to the
press, which is allowed, by a general directive, to reproduce
material from the British press), then of course I withdraw
that particular instance. But I should be much surprised
to hear that this was so. A young German was just about
to get his publisher’s licence when I was in Dusseldorf.
He was anxious to start with a translation of the Beveridge
articles. He told me he had made unofficial inquiries —
as he had not yet received his licence that was all at the
moment he could do — and had been informed that his
proposal was out of the question. The one thing he now
wanted to do was to get away from that stifling atmosphere
and return to London.*

If Mr. Houghton thinks I am wrong in describing all
this as ‘totalitarian democracy’, that must be because he
has forgotten, if he ever knew, what democracy means.”

But while Mr. Houghton’s letter has been the only direct
challenge to my accuracy, several of Mr. Hynd’s state-
ments or replies to questions in the House have been out
of harmony with what I learned on the spot. This dis-
crepancy is mysterious, for presumably the people who
brief Mr. Hynd in London get their information from

* On reading Mr. Houghton’s letter I at once wrote to Hambunr.
I receive a reply as I go to press. My informant, a G.G.G. official
who is in a position to know, writes that he is unaware of any publica-
tion of the Beveridge articles in book or pamphlet form. He adds that
the Gennan News Service was at first not even allowed to circulate
the articles for reproduction in the German press (in spite of the
genera 1 directive which permits such reproduction) owing to a Nor-
iolk House decision, but that subsequently this decision was reversed
under pressure.

246

officials in Germany. I have no explanation to offer, but
will give two examples :

(i) Replying to a question in the House on December
4th about the number of workers employed on the Ham-
burg Project and on the building and repair of houses in
Hamburg for German civilians between October 20th and
November 19th, Mr. Hynd said:

“There were on the average some 9,000 Germans and
1 80 British employed during this period on the Hamburg
Project, and 1,400 Germans employed on emergency
civilian repairs. The figure of 9,000 includes, however,
some 2,500 engaged on rehousing for Germans and some
1,400 employed in providing alternative office accommoda-
tion for Germans. Some 5,100 Germans are, therefore,
engaged on the Hamburg Project proper and 5,300 on
accommodation for German civilians.”

I have before me a document prepared in Hamburg
during October by a responsible officer of our Manpower
Division there, as the result of a request made by me to
the head of Public Relations in that city. This shows 14,226
as the total force employed on the Hamburg Project,
made up of 5,815 Hamburg men, 4,372 imported and
living in camps, 853 imported daily travellers, and 3,186
Dienstgruppen (undemobilised soldiers used as building
labourers) . The document further shows that of this total
approximately 3,500 were employed on rehousing Ger-
mans to be evicted on account of the Hamburg Project,
and on providing alternative office accommodation. Mr.
Hynd’s figure of 1,400 Germans employed on ordinary
civilian repairs agrees roughly with the one I was given.

We therefore get, instead of Mr. Hynd’s “5,100 Germans
employed on the Hamburg Project proper and 5,300 on
accommodation for German civilians” (which would be
disgraceful enough), a net force of over 10,000 employed
on the Project, and 1,400 (or, to give my figure, 1,700)
employed on ordinary civilian repairs.

247

Are we to understand that there was a sudden and very
heavy reduction? But the same document says “at present
I »35 2 men are required” — i.e. in addition to those already
employed.

(2) Mr. Hynd was asked by Mr. Skeffington-Lodge on
December nth whether all the questionnaires already
filled in by the Germans for purposes of denazification were
to be re-examined, with a view to placing all individuals
concerned in one of five categories. His reply was that this
was not the case, and that only 234,000, relating to
persons who have been removed or excluded from office,
were to be re-examined. This reply categorically contra-
dicts a statement made to me at Biinde on November 12 th
by Brigadier Gaffney, to whom I had been referred by
Public Relations for authoritative information, and who
is deputy chief of denazification for the whole zone.
The interview was not in any sense confidential, and I
made detailed notes of what he said as I sat at his table.
He told me quite definitely that all the 1,368,739 Frage-
bogen would be re-examined with a view to categorisation.
I then specifically asked him whether that applied to
people in jobs. He said that it did. I asked whether any
of these people would be liable to penalties. He said that
yes, they would be so liable if placed in any category
other than 5 (the exonerated), but that people in jobs
would presumably be categorised below category 3, and
that therefore at worst only “minor” penalties would be
applied to them. A reference to Control Council Directive
No. 38 (signed on October 12th 1946 by, among others,
General Erskine for General Sir Brian Robertson), on
which the zonal instruction is to be based, shows that
these “minor” penalties (for category 4, or “nominal”
party members) may include periodical reportings to the
police, withholding of permission to leave Germany or a
particular zone, loss of the right to stand for election at any
level, retirement of civil servants or transferto an office with

248

lesser rank (and corresponding measures against persons
in economic enterprises), and single or recurrent fines.

Unless, then, there has been a last-minute change,
whether or not as a result of protests, either Mr. Hynd
or the deputy chief of denazification is misinformed.

Neither of these alternatives seems satisfactory.

• • • • •

In such cases there appears to be a direct conflict of
evidence. Other statements carry on their surface, or a
little below it, their own refutation. In answers to Parlia-
mentary questions, for instance, it sometimes happens
that part of the enquiry is ignored and the remainder
“telescoped” : the result being a false conclusion, which
is the more to be regretted when it occurs in a written
answer, and so cannot be challenged by supplementaries.
Such cases are to be explained, no doubt, by ignorance of
the points involved.

An example. On December nth Mr. Michael Foot
asked the Chancellor of the Duchy what quantity of bread
the normal consumer in Diisseldorf should have received
during the 28-day period starting 14th October in order
to provide the quota necessary to make up 1,548 calories;
what quantity of bread he was actually entitled to receive ;
and if there was sufficient bread to provide the latter
quantity [my italics] or what was the deficiency. Mr.
Hynd replied in a written answer :

“The amount of bread necessary to make up the full ration was
10,000 grammes.”

This is correct. He continued :

“The limited supplies of grain available only permitted a ration of
8,500 grammes.”

This is correct, if understood as replying to the second part
of Mr. Foot’s question, namely “what quantity of bread he
was actually entitled to receive.” Only 8,500 grammes were
“called up” — i.e. no one was entitled to buy more than
8,500 grammes. But when Mr. Hynd concludes :

“leaving a deficiency of 15 per cent.”

he is wildly incorrect. For he has ignored the third part
of the question, namely “and if there was sufficient bread
to provide the latter quantity” — i.e. the 8,500 grammes.
The. fact is that during the first three weeks of the period
there was sufficient bread to provide only about 50 per
cent, of the “called up”, the 8,500, ration. (I made my
investigation during the fourth week, and so was able to
get figures for the first three weeks only.) What people
actually got to eat that month, therefore, was not 85 per
cent, of 10,000 grammes but (on the unwarranted
assumption that the 8,500 ration was met in full during
the fourth week) say 60 per cent, of that 85 per cent. In
other words, the total deficiency was not 15 per cent, but
about 50 per cent. And remember, please, that we are
not talking about trivialities ; the difference between Mr.
Hynd s figure and the real one is the difference between a
little less bread on some days and no bread at all on many.
* • • •

Of a different order are statements that are liable, but
not of course designed, to mislead. Here, again, is an
example :

Mr. Hynd said on November 27th that “we proceeded
to dismantle, or to allow the dismantling of, seven plants.
. . . Beyond that, we are not proceeding with any dis-
mantling at the present time.” A little earlier the
Minister had qualified the figure seven by “I think”.
If challenged in a court of law this statement could be
successfully defended even by inferior counsel ; for indeed
we are not at the moment actually removing anything
from any factories other than the seven (which are
incidentally nine) to which Mr. Hynd referred. But
would a man be unduly innocent if he concluded from the
Minister s statement that, for the time being at least,
we were suspending the whole “procedure”? How many
would be likely to infer that we have been meanwhile
“proceeding” with the various steps that culminate in

dismantling — affixing Law 52, inspecting, valuing, and
finally allocating to one or other of the I don’t know how
many harpy-nations that have been hovering in Brussels
for their share of the prey? Could M.P.s have expected
that when, only a week later, Major Bruce was to ask
whether it was proposed to dismande the turbine repair
shop or the sawmill or the remaining cranes at Bloehm
& Voss, Mr. Hynd would reply that yes, they were “due
to be dismantled and removed after allocation by the Inter-
Allied Reparations Agency ”? Was the Chancellor aware,
to use the parliamentary formula, that, as stated in the
text, I had received from the head of our Reparations
Division in one of the most important Lander, and as lately
as November 1 4th, the day I left for home, a list of “factories
which have come into the category of ‘Condemned and
without hope of reprieve’. These will be allocated and
dismanded in the immediate future”? Could anyone have
imagined, as they heard the words “we are not pro-
ceeding with any demanding”, that, as also stated in the
text, the Regional Commissioner of North Rhine-West-
phalia had declared with the maximum of publicity — to be
precise, at a press conference — exactly a month before that
“he was awaiting orders for dismantling” certain factories,
the names of which he gave and circulated? And finally,
what reacdons would be likely in Members who happened
to hear a statement put out on December 3rd by the
British-sponsored German News Service, as follows :

“Cologne: It was announced today at a press con-
ference of the Cologne Chamber of Industry and Com-
merce that important machine-tool plants in the industrial
area of Cologne are to be dismanded. The factories con-
cerned are: Alfred H. Schuette A.G. at Koeln-Deutz,
Hermann Kolb at Koeln-E-hrenfeld, Maier, Roth &
Pastor A.G. at Koeln-Raderberg, Mueller & Schwambom,
Machine factory G.M.B.H. at Rodenkirchen.

“The Alfred H. Schuette A.G. was, apart from Pickier

251

in Leipzig, the only plant in Germany producing multi-
spindle automats. It also manufactured precision parts for
tool machines. Hermann Kolb is the only firm in the
British zone producing a special kind of drilling machine
since the Hetter tool machine factory in Muenster-Eifel
was destroyed and also put on the dismantling list. The
Maier, Roth and Pastor A.G. is producing chain-welding
machines for the mining industry and also wire and masts.
The Mueller & Schwambom machine factory is the only
firm in the British zone producing wire-rope machinery
for the mining industry.”

I am not suggesting for a moment that Mr. Hynd
intended to mislead ; what I do suggest is that, driven by
his position to defend things of which all who know him
must suspect he disapproves, he made a statement less
open to criticism for the letter of it than for the spirit.

Is the reader convinced? If not, perhaps this extract
from The Times will convince him. The date-line is
Brussels, December r i th :

“The inter-allied Reparations Agency denies Press
reports that no further industrial reparations will be forth-
coming from the British zone of Germany.

“Arrangements have just been completed between the
Commander-in-Chief of the British zone and the Agency
for the immediate release, as reparations, of general purpose
machine-tools and equipment to a value of 75,000,000
reichsmarks. The Agency expects that the allocations of
this equipment among its 18 member-nations entitled to
receive reparations from Germany will be completed
early next year. This amount is additional to other plant and
equipment in the British zone which has already been
allocated by the Agency to member-nations and will soon
be dismantled and removed

The italics are mine.

THE END

252

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